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RivieraKid 1 days ago [-]
I'm not that young anymore but when I hear Dario Amodei speak and gesticulate enthusiastically about how AI will soon make my job redundant, from a positio of someone who can retire now and who benefits from AI possibly replacing workers, it's very hard to like him.
giancarlostoro 24 hours ago [-]
Lets suppose everyone in the world miraculously loses their jobs to AI, who is paying for it? How? What are they selling? What stops the rest of humanity from turning data centers into a pile of ash?
These people are so disconnected from reality.
xedrac 20 hours ago [-]
I think they believe that AI will account for nearly all production, and jobs will no longer be necessary. At the very least, it's going to be tumultuous.
ahmetson 20 hours ago [-]
I think they know it’s not soon as they promise so they lie openly.
johneth 14 hours ago [-]
They "believe" that for the sake of their stock options and IPOs, not out of any actual belief.
digitaltrees 8 hours ago [-]
Haha dario said privately that anthropic will be the only company. yes the ONLY company. The economy will be anthropic and governments, thats it.
palmotea 6 hours ago [-]
> Lets suppose everyone in the world miraculously loses their jobs to AI, who is paying for it? How? What are they selling?
The paying/selling part will be transitory. Right now the people paying for it are investors, and they're selling a cost-cutting dream to executive managers.
If someone builds a machine that automated all the jobs, they've have amassed an unprecedented amount of power, even if the economy is in ruins for everyone else. They won't need to sell anything to anyone.
> What stops the rest of humanity from turning data centers into a pile of ash?
AI slaughterbots. Think the Ukraine front line, but completely automated.
The current oligarchy has forgotten the lessons of history.
The implicit deal is that they can keep extracting the value from us as long as they keep tossing us enough scraps.
They show every intention of claiming a bigger piece of the pie in return for basically nothing, and that kind of shit will lead to an unstable system eventually.
tim333 8 hours ago [-]
Historically, new tech making a job redundant leads to people who were doing it doing something else - horse stagecoach drivers become motorised vehicle drivers and so forth. I'm not quite sure what Dario's take is on that.
digitaltrees 8 hours ago [-]
Except that there is a lot of hardship during the transition. Literal kids starving in the streets. The entire midwest is a testament to what happens when short sighted policy assumes systems are self healing. There are generational assets like well built factories and railroads that took immense capital and literally cost lives of willing and unwilling laborers to build that are just wasting away and returning to nature and for what? No everyone wants a manufacturing rebuild? How about we take all the capital wasted on SaaS and data centers and rebuild the factories in Akron, OH or Thomasville, NC. Instead we are giving billions to the uber founder so he can "launch the next industrial revolution".
tim333 7 hours ago [-]
Though a lot of that was a political choice to outsource to China and similar. We've had a lot of new tech since 1900 - cars, electric motors, internet, computers and the like and I'm not sure it's led to inevitable unemployment as opposed to people doing different jobs. The times there were mass unemployment like the great depression were more down to dumb economics and politics rather than tech.
Even with AGI robots smarter than us I think there's a good chance it would go like the Antebellum South with robots replacing the slaves and humans planning their debutantes balls.
digitaltrees 4 hours ago [-]
Yes it was political. But only possible by the shipping container which was a technology shift.
It’s not purely that people shift to other jobs, it’s what jobs and where. A union manufacturing job and retail cashier job at dollar tree are not equivalent. And when the whole core of a company moves they aren’t replaced.
The real number is work force participation. It’s down. Alot. Economic share of wages is down. Alot.
ethbr1 1 hours ago [-]
There's two concepts unaccounted for by the "but different jobs" pro-AI economic rewriting story.
1. As you say, new jobs of what sort, with what labor power, and at what pay?
Offshoring manufacturing was as much about breaking US labor unions as anything else. No unions in China, and no bad press about feuding with US workers. Just 'oops, new economic reality, things change, so sorry'.
Making high value add jobs disappear and replacing them with only low value add jobs isn't a net gain.
2. What mechanism do people see realistically distributing hypothetical bountiful gains from AI-boosted productivity?
Let's imagine AI works out perfectly: productivity gains through the roof, entire industries automated, record corporate profits across the board.
What plausible path do people see from that (and the unemployment it spiked) to most people being given a chunk of the profits?
Remember: they're already legally spoken for by the shareholders.
Introducing new corporate tax rates at the federal level? Ha!
And even if UBI manages the get through in some form... how much do you think that will be?
Which is to say, how much of their wealth do you think the richest will be willing to part with to redistribute?
Because history says as little as they can get away with.
digitaltrees 48 minutes ago [-]
I agree with most of your points and think you’re asking the right questions. Unfortunately, our opinions don’t really matter.
The only thing I would say is that shareholders don’t have an exclusive legal right to profit. That is a policy choice and one that has shifted over time (American law has moved to the extreme shareholder maximizing end of the spectrum) and is currently different in other countries (Germany has a corporate governance structure that Requires an employee and union board of directors so it isn’t just shareholders interests that are represented in governance decisions.
tim333 1 minutes ago [-]
I figure your opinions and similar one will matter because in a democracy people can vote to redistribute the wealth however.
palmotea 6 hours ago [-]
> Though a lot of that was a political choice to outsource to China and similar. We've had a lot of new tech since 1900 - cars, electric motors, internet, computers and the like and I'm not sure it's led to inevitable unemployment as opposed to people doing different jobs. The times there were mass unemployment like the great depression were more down to dumb economics and politics rather than tech.
None of those technological shifts affected so many of the jobs at once, nor did they simultaneously threaten many of the alternative jobs for those affected.
> Even with AGI robots smarter than us I think there's a good chance it would go like the Antebellum South with robots replacing the slaves and humans planning their debutantes balls.
Ok. So you have a small number of planters with big estates, what happens to all the other people (e.g. the "slaves" and other worksers, after the planters no longer need them)?
Wealth is not distributed evenly enough for such a fantasy. Dario Amodei and Sam Altman will be able to go play planter. Me? Not so much.
ethbr1 1 hours ago [-]
> Ok. So you have a small number of planters with big estates, what happens to all the other people (e.g. the "slaves" and other worksers, after the planters no longer need them)?
It's an apt metaphor, but probably not in the way parent intended it. History says there will certainly be hoarders of wealth... and then everyone else.
red-iron-pine 5 hours ago [-]
all of the memes showing up on 8chan, dark net forums, corners of reddit, make it clear what they're about: Zachariah 13:8
> in all the land, two-thirds will be cut off and perish, but one-third will be left alive
e.g. game reviewer ssethtzentach added it to his most recent video, etc.
the messaging is following a similar trend as qanon, you can tell there is a broad effort to get this trickling into popular consciousness, though it's hard to tell if this is to get people to accept it or fight it
dofm 20 hours ago [-]
If there isn't an appropriate metaphor in the Silmarillion he's not going to have thought about it.
Yizahi 10 hours ago [-]
After mentally stepping aside from the cozy developed country context, the answer becomes obvious really. Regular citizens won't pay for the excesses of our benevolent overlords if they have no income, but they will build and sustain that excess for pittance or for food or for free. Look at any country rapidly de-evolving back in time - Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan and the most prominent North Korea. So it's not a fluke or regional, it happens across the globe - when living conditions degrade, in most cases people just tend to adapt and adapt and adapt until they continue working but in subhuman conditions.
cute_boi 23 hours ago [-]
And, idk what is the end goal here. Even if 20% of people lose their job the crime and prostitution will shoot up....
red-iron-pine 5 hours ago [-]
profound luxury for a few; North Korea or the short story "manna" by M Brain for the rest of us
DANmode 22 hours ago [-]
More free time for proper rest, hobby, and well-considered expression?
I’m not saying Anthropic and OpenAI are going to be the ones to deliver it - but…you really don’t see the ubiquitous need for these?
apple4ever 18 hours ago [-]
How will we be able to have those when we have no job and no home and no money?
DANmode 9 hours ago [-]
Again, this isn’t my perspective, just again parroting what’s being asked for:
if there’s less work to be done for everyone to have what they need, that would be considered a benefit by governed society, and universal basic income will likely be rolled out.
palmotea 6 hours ago [-]
> if there’s less work to be done for everyone to have what they need, that would be considered a benefit by governed society
Not necessarily. It's not going to be evenly distributed. It's not like today, but everyone works 4 hours a week. Some dudes will work 80, others won't work at all. That situation is what's most adventitious to shareholders.
> and universal basic income will likely be rolled out.
If UBI even happens, it's going to enable a poverty-level existence.
Thing of all the things you enjoy doing, that you wouldn't be able to afford if you were in poverty. That's UBI life.
red-iron-pine 5 hours ago [-]
why likely? the guys who have all of the money are trying their hardest to crush it
literally the ones related to this very site
digitaltrees 8 hours ago [-]
The data is already in, AI makes employer expectations increase not decrease, and employees report working more hours not less.
quantified 21 hours ago [-]
Ain't going to happen and you know it.
preg_match 20 hours ago [-]
It might happen but it certainly won’t be instant. It will take decades, and in the meantime what happens? Are those people just unbelievably fucked? Our current economic systems literally cannot handle this. The underpinning of all of capitalism is that you work, and you consume.
If even one of those assumptions is no longer true, nothing works. And when I mean nothing, I mean nothing. Money doesn’t work, rent doesn’t work, debt doesn’t work, labor doesn’t work, production doesn’t work. It would have to be a quick de-industrialization unless we have a plan. No more monkey-patching with social programs, this is an entire paradigm shift.
DANmode 21 hours ago [-]
Not saying it will - just that that’s how they’re selling the shares and taking on the giant investments.
Blinding need. We don’t have time for each other like we used to.
DANmode 20 hours ago [-]
“Not with that attitude!”
scotty79 23 hours ago [-]
You also just explained how people fearing that AI will take all jobs are equally disconnected from reality. Although in less joyful manner.
r_lee 23 hours ago [-]
what kind of bargaining power will you have with "well someone must consume!"?
scotty79 14 hours ago [-]
All of the power? Without consumers, no business has any reason to exist.
You can do business without workers, investors, shareholders. You can't do business without consumers.
r_lee 13 hours ago [-]
so how will there be any other class than a basic UBI class that gets the bare minimum, with no way to climb the ladder in any way?
why would businesses need everybody to participate when a specific portion of people are enough?
scotty79 12 hours ago [-]
I don't think only UBI will remain. People will be getting money through a lot of different schemes, some merit or effort based. So there will be ways to climb. Just not through "hard work" because the "work" part is going to be mostly missing. To see how climbing the ladder might look in the future look at spots in our society that perform no useful economic activity. Military, prisons, government offices, the rich, homeless. How you get ahead there is going be the way you go ahead everywhere in a society where human work is obsolete.
> why would businesses need everybody to participate when a specific portion of people are enough?
For business nothing is ever enough. It creates products and customers for them out of thin air. The only required thing is money in the consumer pocket. Business itself is going to pressure governments to give more people more money, by whatever means necessary, so it can scoop it up off of them.
What even some millionaires now realize is that it's very hard to take the money away from other millionaires. They don't spend that much. But if you tax them and give the money to consumers, suddenly, as a rich person, you have clear path to taking this money for yourself, just by having a successful customer facing business.
That (among other things) is why some rich advocate for higher taxation of the rich.
If everyone around you is poor it's very hard to get any richer yourself, regardless of how much you already have. And rich people like getting richer most of all.
inigyou 12 hours ago [-]
By that logic homeless people should be powerful because they're potential consumers. But the system only gives power to those who can produce things that are valuable to wealthy people.
scotty79 12 hours ago [-]
> But the system only gives power to those who can produce
Spot on. So that's the main point that needs to be addressed. Or rather expanded upon. Because already a ton of people get awarded purchasing power without doing any useful economic activity.
And it's gonna be expanded because without purchasing power we can't play the game called business. And people like business, because it makes some of them richer and richer.
lenkite 15 hours ago [-]
The rich people sell to each other and AI corps while maintaining a strong "freedom" force to ensure that their "rights" are protected. Injury to a data-center will be considered an act of vile terrorism and punished with life-detention employment (aka slave labour) or the relife correction (if your organs are good for farming).
inigyou 12 hours ago [-]
And you'll still have to pay rent or property taxes, and if you don't pay rent then armed thugs will come to "your" house and kick you out of it. Despite the fact it's literally impossible to pay because there are no jobs.
h05sz487b 17 hours ago [-]
TBH the promise of many technologies has been making work redundant. But they used to be more diplomatic about it.
7 hours ago [-]
piloto_ciego 22 hours ago [-]
Man, I see this stuff, and I think, "my god! think of the opportunity we have to replace the current economic system with something where we're not all in a fierce knife fight to try to stay employed so we don't starve!"
We have to stop fearing the machines and start fearing the firmware running on our brains! It's capitalism that's the problem, not the robots... if anything the robots can liberate us from capital's death grip!
trescenzi 22 hours ago [-]
If Dario was up there preaching about replacing today with Star Trek I think people wouldn’t hate it. Everything those at the head of this project say amounts to the current state except abject poverty for everyone but them. When Dario donates his share in Anthropic to fight hunger I’ll consider being optimistic that capital is going anywhere.
Yizahi 10 hours ago [-]
Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm no trekkie myself, but isn't Star Trek timeline starts with a series or world wars in 21st century which results in a nuclear holocaust and a big fraction of planet inhabitants exterminated? Doesn't sound very enticing honestly :)
skupig 22 hours ago [-]
>replace the current economic system with something where we're not all in a fierce knife fight to try to stay employed
Jobs will become even more scarce, so how does that follow?
>robots can liberate us from capital's death grip
We are already live in a world sufficiently technologically advanced to feed and house everyone, and yet we don't.
digitaltrees 8 hours ago [-]
Its not capitalism thats the problem, its that monopolies and capital concentration destroy capitalism, and we have let monopolies and capital concentration run uncheck for several generations. A capitalist system would be only small local businesses, no walmarts, no Tyson chicken, no google, when you have 1000s of small producers competing the price setting function of a market actually works, and the wealth is distributed among all the producers rather than the Walton family.
skupig 45 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, or to put it a different way, an ineffective, easily corrupted, and insufficiently representative government is the problem.
grebc 22 hours ago [-]
It’s amusing to imagine the oligarchs are going to anymore charitable than currently.
piloto_ciego 22 hours ago [-]
They don't have to be charitable.
We can literally take it from them. I get why people don't like to think about that sort of thing, but... yeah. We could make AI a sort of public good and do something like the Permanent Fund Dividend or something. There's lots of options even in the "reformist" way of thinking about it. But we shouldn't be naive.
inigyou 12 hours ago [-]
You can't use HN to advocate for violent uprising.
piloto_ciego 2 hours ago [-]
Now did I advocate for that? There's a hell of a lot of room between laissez faire ancap nonsense and October Revolution.
The binary thinking in this thread and the lack of creativity is just... astounding to me.
archagon 10 hours ago [-]
Yes, you must launder any advocacy for violence through the use of neutral language like “defense industry,” which has wide support and even VC funding around here.
digitaltrees 8 hours ago [-]
Did you ever stop to think why that shift has happened? if you want to stop mass objection to oppressing a population owning drone company is a good portfolio asset.
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
There's nothing violent about the defense industry.
archagon 3 hours ago [-]
There's nothing violent about eminent domain, either.
(Also... LOL.)
grebc 21 hours ago [-]
Oh yeah don’t be naive, but we’ll just take what we want. Ok bro.
digitaltrees 8 hours ago [-]
There werent drones and palintir and flock. Protesters were just sentenced to 50 years in prison.
piloto_ciego 20 hours ago [-]
I mean, we've done it before lol
red-iron-pine 5 hours ago [-]
with muskets, not social media that has already made a reasonably good guess at your actual name and address.
a ding to the social credit score but not enough for a drone or ICE team to be dispatched to your address. but that might change.
piloto_ciego 2 hours ago [-]
New times require new techniques.
SR2Z 22 hours ago [-]
It's not their choice, no matter how much they'd like it to be.
The Chinese models are able to distill outputs into a model of slightly worse performance within a few weeks of each release, and the same copyright exemptions which protect these guys scraping also protect China.
As long as their lobbyists don't win (and the deck is stacked against them, make no mistake) the future of AI is not going to be owned by the frontier labs.
17 hours ago [-]
JKCalhoun 20 hours ago [-]
Is it the replacing workers thing so much or are young people just fucking sick of tech (and Silicon Valley in general) and AI is the latest whipping boy?
(Or maybe I'm just projecting.)
red-iron-pine 5 hours ago [-]
before tech had the potential to make my life easier, more fun, smoother.
say what you will about uber but it is a seamless service. there are a lot of great apps out there.
now tech isn't making things better it's rapidly converting to aggressive rent seeking, and everyone can see it.
only a rube thinks Big Tech is going to make tomorrow better for everyone.
digitaltrees 7 hours ago [-]
I think tech has shifted. It was a relatively balanced political ecosystem, not the far right fever swamp like finance. There were libertarians and communists, now the libertarians that read atlas shrugged have accumulated enough power to make a push to escape democracy, capitalism, and any constraints on their power. So tech isnt what it was when it was the hippie dreamer open source all the things culture people liked.
bbor 1 days ago [-]
Talk about shooting the messenger…
JustResign 1 days ago [-]
A CEO of a large AI company is hardly just a "messenger" here. Come on now.
superze 23 hours ago [-]
He is just the poor little head of the snake.
bbor 23 hours ago [-]
I… yes, he is. He wasn’t born when this was put in motion by Turing in 1950, and he quit OpenAI to try to stick to their original mission, which was exclusively and ambitiously to prevent what most (who cared to look at it) assumed was inevitable.
AI isn’t a new iPhone moment, it’s a fire moment. Dario Amodei didn’t bring it into existence, physics did — we’re just slowly working out the cognitive science for the first time after Crysis machines ended up being really good at something that our type of intelligence relies on (intuitive framing via huge neural networks — see The Frame Problem).
Also this doesn’t really matter in anthropic’s case, but FWIW: we should try to blame CEOs a bit less, and shareholders (capitalists) a lot more. Our system isn’t named ‘officerism’, after all!
shibapuppie 19 hours ago [-]
Absolutely! I mean, they didn't start the fire so why are we mad at them for fueling the fire?? It's not their fault!!
bbor 17 hours ago [-]
Anthropic has not been “fueling the fire”. They’re the reason most of y’all even know there’s a fire.
caterwhal 19 hours ago [-]
Terribly interesting that being a messenger these days is so lucrative. $15.5b net worth, while definitely not at the top of the food chain, is really living in this day and age, wouldn't you say? Simply wonderful to be just aligned so nicely in the progression of the universe, because all this was decided long, long ago after all, to just be leaving us all a kind note that everything humanity has achieved thus far is moot, there is nothing in our current system we should carry forward, that there isn't any possibility that we could use our very small minds to come up with any concerns or reasons why this might be the best path, and that no, we don't have any say in it, and for his paltry and humble service to us on the behalf on Physics, Dario squeaks out a living just like the rest of us.
So kind also of Physics himself to have gone to such trouble, to have invented all these brilliant GPUs in the first place, synthesized trillions of dollars to build the data centers to hold them, and burned the midnight electrons mining all that coal and natural gas to fuel the power plants it built too.
All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds in which inevitability steers our destiny. You know, I've really been considering getting a lobotomy myself. I guess it's a pretty grand idea that thinking is now categorically outmoded. But then again I might really should have done it when they were cheaper in 2010, because Physics had it all under control anyway!
The fundamental delusion of this take is why we are suffering this lunacy. When the crash happens after the circular ponzi scheme hanging all its risk on the public breaks apart the hatred for these lunatics will be justified.
But then I guess the lunatics would simply claim that they didn't have enough situational awareness as they run away with our tax money after the bailout.
bbor 17 hours ago [-]
When the crash happens after the circular ponzi scheme hanging all its risk on the public breaks apart
Any day now, we’ll all realize that the scientists were wrong all along, and were just lying to scare us. Any day now! Ed Zitron has proof that it’ll happen before the end of 2023, even.
solid_fuel 1 days ago [-]
The CEO of a major AI company is not “the messenger”
happytoexplain 24 hours ago [-]
He's the guy doing the thing that he is delivering the message about...
59nadir 1 days ago [-]
How oblivious are people to the world that they think this is somehow strange or hard to believe? Why would they like any of the tech CEOs, or CEOs in general?
It's hard to see why basically anyone would at this point.
inigyou 12 hours ago [-]
Powerful people are almost always surrounded by an insulating layer of people who tell them what they want to hear.
Do you remember when the AI CEOs spoke at college graduations? They got flustered when they were booed, they literally didn't understand why they were being booed.
mitchdoogle 23 hours ago [-]
Because the products these companies produce are extremely popular, and people benefit from them.
kakwa_ 18 hours ago [-]
Well, we are talking about the CEOs, not the companies.
And these CEOs have very little to do with creating and improving said companies' products. The repeated outlandish claims kind of definitely broke this illusion.
apple4ever 18 hours ago [-]
Even if both are true (which is arguably), it's only at the current price point. When prices start to match what it costs, that will change greatly.
graemep 20 hours ago [-]
They are widely used but not liked and net benefits are arguable.
gitaarik 19 hours ago [-]
They are liked by many though. And net benefits are arguable
preg_match 19 hours ago [-]
They’re useful right now, under the explicit pretense that their goal is to literally ruin your life. No more work, I guess you die now, bye bye.
Maybe that won’t happen, but these CEOs not only tell us it will happen, they have the gall to brag about it. Of course that’s unpopular.
“Yeah I plan to basically torture most of the world’s population until they eventually die. Except the elite few who hold the AI means of production. Wait, why are you booing?”
gitaarik 19 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bbor 1 days ago [-]
Sure, CEOs are rarely appreciated in general. But the anti-tech sentiment is absolutely a new and rapidly growing beast. It’s different — trust me.
chillfox 24 hours ago [-]
A lot of tech recently has just made things worse.
Uber made the taxi experience way worse and less predictable.
Now, I can’t just walk out of a bar, get into a clean taxi and go home, I have to fiddle with an app, wait, wave trying to identify “my” ride, then hope it’s clean and safe. It’s a nightmare compared to what we had before.
Uber eats made food delivery significantly worse and more expensive.
It used to be that I could get food delivered for a known fixed price, it would arrive while still hot and it would be delivered to the door.
Now, the price is obfuscated, there’s an extra fee for getting the food warm, sometimes the drinks are spilled into the bag, delivery is to the curb so I have to go outside to get it.
There’s a lot more that has been made worse by tech companies.
ishouldstayaway 23 hours ago [-]
I agree wholeheartedly with your first sentence here. But I find it difficult to think of a worse example you could have picked than taxis. For all Uber's many faults, the taxi companies were worse. Hell they're still worse.
Are you old enough to remember the bad old days?
jazzcomputer 23 hours ago [-]
Whilst you can argue that services may have improved in some respects, the action towards resolution to problems is carefully monitored to help as least as possible and insulate accountability within a blanket of 'help' agents.
dwohnitmok 22 hours ago [-]
Infuriating as it is, this is still better than with the bad old days of taxis, which usually had even worse resolution and accountability. It sounds like people don't quite grasp just how bad the taxi experience was.
chillfox 20 hours ago [-]
The taxi experience was pretty great where I live and where I traveled.
I guess we were experiencing different parts of the world.
craftwerk 5 hours ago [-]
I can share an example of a trip we just did to South America to two countries. Four out of four taxi rides were scams. Things are better to the extent there were controls in place, like taxi meters and an app. There the scam was less but still involved scams. Too long to detail in a comment here.
I should also mention we tried to use their version of Uber (DiDi), but I suspect there was some kind of price-fixing attempt there because no taxis would come for the price that they suggested. We had the option of upping our price until someone came and then I gave up on the service.
My other experiences were some years back in upstate New York, where there were also questionable practices, and you really had to look over the driver’s shoulder. They tried to control scams with payments based on zones, and the drivers would bend the rules when possible.
dwohnitmok 18 hours ago [-]
To be clear the happy path for taxis for me was fine. When things worked things were quite smooth. But this thread is primarily about when things went off the happy path. If a taxi didn't show up, I'd usually have a disinterested dispatcher to talk with who might be able to send another in a half hour. If a taxi intentionally went the long way around to charge more, I'd have to have an argument with the cabbie about this and maybe things would go well maybe they wouldn't. While I didn't personally experience harassment from cabbies I definitely know people who have. So on and so forth. In all of these cases off the happy path the usual recourse back then was worse than the recourse today with e.g. Uber.
Again the overwhelming majority of my taxi rides were fine. The overwhelming majority of my Uber rides are also fine. But when things go wrong they definitely went wrong worse with taxis than Uber rides for me.
12 hours ago [-]
chillfox 20 hours ago [-]
I assume this is a case of I live in a part of the world where it was different to how it was where you live... Or we value different things.
JohnFen 12 hours ago [-]
> Are you old enough to remember the bad old days?
I'm old enough to remember them. I very much preferred the "bad old days" over bad new days of ride-sharing services.
gdulli 23 hours ago [-]
TV has unskippable and targeted commercials now. The list goes on and on.
Gud 18 hours ago [-]
You and I must live in parallel universes or something.
You can still hail cabs off the street, it’s just that it’s an inefficient way of getting a ride.
Using uber I will immediately see the price up front and I can tailor the cab to my needs and price.
throw-the-towel 23 hours ago [-]
My experience with Uber is the opposite, FWIW.
apple4ever 18 hours ago [-]
What? The reason Uber was so successful is because it was better. You don't have to waive your hand and pray they see you and stop. You use an app which is easy and you know when they are coming. And you can know the price ahead of time and the route. I've never gotten into a dirty Uber but definitely have gotten into dirty taxis. Whatever Ubers faults, they are better than taxis.
And at best you could get pizza delivered. Now everything can be delivered. Just because sometimes the drivers mess up doesn't mean overall it's worse.
Neither of your examples are good ones for your point.
kakwa_ 17 hours ago [-]
Complaining with the angle of "cold pizzas and spilled cola" fills a bit of touch when considering the human exploitation on the other side.
kakwa_ 17 hours ago [-]
The anti-tech has been there for a while.
In my opinion, the moment tech perception flipped from "it's kind of cool" to "I don't trust it" was E. Snowden in 2013.
For more than one decade now, we have progressively switched to treating tech more like a cigarette addiction we should keep in check (even if we don't succeed) rather than the qualify of life improvement, communication & entertainment tool it could be.
And tech companies don't care anymore. We went from Google's "don't be evil" to CEO's clamoring they will maybe make us jobless, and potentially kill us all, with Uber & Amazon's run of the mill human exploitation in the middle for good measure.
happytoexplain 24 hours ago [-]
The pace of growth of hatred is new (thanks to AI, mostly), but it's been sitting at a simmer for 20 years.
It's just Neo Luddite stuff... we don't have to accept the current status quo. Good lord I'd love it if all my needs were met by the abundance of the planet and I could spend my days working on projects I liked and exploring.
Why can't anyone see beyond their job?
defrost 22 hours ago [-]
It's not the no job part that troubles them, it's the question of where basic levels of food, clothing, shelter are going to come from, and the means to have objects of desire and the freedom to travel.
Maybe you can't see that, but for a good many people hovering about the knife edge of just getting by such things are a pressing concern.
Perhaps in future Halcyon days when all needs are met joy will be had by all .. right now there's a looming gap of uncertainty for many.
piloto_ciego 22 hours ago [-]
Well, those are political decisions, and WE (not the nebulous "they") are who make those decisions.
Like, I lost literally everything when I got sick. I think I probably understand "hovering about the knife edge" better than most people on this site. I lost my career, my sense of identity, and more than most can imagine. When you have faced explaining to your son how you might not make it through treatment and how he'll be responsible for a lot of things I am responsible for going forward, you kind of look at these people whining about AI codegen and sigh. This freaking technological miracle that might make their jobs obsolete so they're afraid of it, those people are as children who cannot see that it could literally free them from stupid bullshit... You people are not your jobs, you're not your salary and your job at ServiceNow or SalesForce or whatever can never love you back. The robot isn't a threat to you, the system that values the robot more than you is. It's basic root cause analysis.
But I bounced back. I fought through it. I kept on slogging through the stress and catastrophe. This whole thing feels like the meme to me, "oh, fist time?"
You know what I learned though? That we are not always powerless to act. We can get up and go. We can create! We can just do stuff. People need to realize that they have agency! Your life can get better if you get to continue it (hopefully). You are allowed to live how you want to live, you can do things! You don't have to accept being fed dog shit every day. How many of these people bitching and moaning about AI have even thought to try to form a union? How many of these people vote? How many of these people get off their assess and go and participate in some direct action? How many?
Dammit, why don't I see anyone in the street protesting the war? Why don't I see anyone protesting the lack of social safety nets? Why don't I see anyone doing anything. You know why? Because doing things is hard. Because most people want things to change without putting in any of the work (sometimes dangerous, sometimes stressful) to change things. And meanwhile, I see AI - which could literally be a tool we use to fix the injustices of the world, the disaster of tying people's right to exist to their pay check - that NONSENSE that we mostly all hate, and the response is "oh my god what if it takes my job?" or so-called "leftists" bending over backwards to defend copyright law.
These people complaining don't want the system to change, they just want to maintain a privileged position within it. But if the system has always been harming people at the margins, is it ok if we go back? "Oh, thank goodness we made AI illegal so I can still have to fill out my manual TPS reports and report to Bob on my progress for the week! How great is that!" The lack of imagination of a better world is astounding and disheartening. The whiners and perpetual malcontents shouting about AI secretly want to be the billionaire, not overthrow a system that allows them in the first place. They want their previously privileged status as a "knowledge worker" to remain special.
Man, am I the only one in here who read Marx? Bell Hooks? Kropotkin? Dream bigger people!
pibaker 20 hours ago [-]
>read marx
>dreams of man made famine and desolation
Do you happen to wear glasses, mister Ciego? Me and my marx reading boys have some bourgeois liquidation quotas to fill.
piloto_ciego 19 hours ago [-]
You ever read Marx?
I’m not a Marxist, but jeepers, it should be required reading of people.
defrost 17 hours ago [-]
As I recall he had a short passage or two on the Swan River Colony, and I'm pretty sure Don McLeod* read a bit of that.
Just because something is inevitable doesn't mean the people whose family's lives get fucked up along the way are somehow assholes or unrealistic for demanding that we handle it in a more controlled/extended way that doesn't cause so much misery.
scrumper 22 hours ago [-]
Magical wishful thinking is as misguided as even the most rabid anti-tech critique.
Your - piloto_ciego - needs will never be met by the abundance of the planet. Perhaps your great great great grandchildren may begin to live in such a free way, but you and everyone else alive now will not. There are too many people on the planet, wealth is too unevenly distributed, food production is too unevenly distributed, water is too unevenly distributed, energy production is too unevenly distributed; the only way anyone can get their needs met is by participating in an economy which can allocate and relocate those scarce resources.
All AI is doing is taking an increasingly large share of those resources in pursuit of ensuring the survival of an ouroboros of circular funding between a tiny number of companies to the detriment of everyone else attempting to participate in that economy.
AI may or may not prove to be a significant step on the ladder to the ultimate end of scarcity, but there is no possible way that anyone you could conceivably meet, much less be, will ever experience the kind of life liberated from toil that you wish for.
Electricity promised to eliminate toil and bring us a life of leisure. It did not. Perhaps all technologies have this potential, AI included. That potential will never be realized because relentless and perpetual growth is a necessary precondition and justification for the development and expansion of such technologies, and that growth demands and consumes whatever excess human capacity that the technology freed up.
The best you can hope for is to exploit the technology selfishly, carving out a life of scholarly pursuit and passion projects while rent-seeking on top of the economic work of humans who couldn't get there as fast as you. But that has been an option since the invention of money.
piloto_ciego 22 hours ago [-]
Dude, I'm building an off grid cabin in the woods. I already live pretty "freely." Dream bigger. We can change and make the world awesome! We have to want to though.
> Electricity promised to eliminate toil and bring us a life of leisure. It did not. Perhaps all technologies have this potential, AI included. That potential will never be realized because relentless and perpetual growth is a necessary precondition and justification for the development and expansion of such technologies, and that growth demands and consumes whatever excess human capacity that the technology freed up.
Also, this speaks to me as someone who has never used used a screw driver to turn a screw into a board. The drill driver has made it amazingly better.
EDIT to add:
Also, I've lived a subsistence lifestyle before, I'm fairly close to doing it again though I'll still need some money to roll through the household? Dream bigger buddy. It's not all doom and gloom.
happytoexplain 11 hours ago [-]
>Dream bigger.
Ironically, this oversimplification is narrow-minded.
inigyou 12 hours ago [-]
Until the AI people use some political games to justify why your land actually belongs to them, and then come and kick you, the trespasser, off their land.
Such games may involve property taxes, eminent domain, or similar.
piloto_ciego 7 hours ago [-]
Maybe. But that's less of an issue where I'm at.
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
For now.
scrumper 11 hours ago [-]
> Also, this speaks to me as someone who has never used used a screw driver to turn a screw into a board. The drill driver has made it amazingly better.
You are inadvertently proving my point. Yes an impact driver makes it easier to get a screw into a board, but a carpenter still works a full day. Technology's reducing effect on labor effort is always used to increase output, never to decrease input.
> Dream bigger
I am awake.
piloto_ciego 7 hours ago [-]
I doubt you're "awake" in any sort of matter. The percentage of farm hands today is a lot lower than 200 years ago.
Dream bigger. You're not awake, you're clinging to a fantasy where you get to be a special privileged member of society. That is done. We're not going back.
You can sit here moaning about how you used to be special and important, or you can start doing the hard work of building a society where not having a job doesn't put your very survival at risk.
scrumper 5 hours ago [-]
You are not understanding a word I am writing. That is fine. I wish you luck in your Walden fantasy, constructed with the fruits of the economy you refuse to participate in.
> or you can start doing the hard work of building a society where not having a job doesn't put your very survival at risk.
Escaping to a forest cabin might well be hard work but it helps nobody other than yourself. You are escaping from society, not building a new one. Your comments about privilege are deeply misplaced.
piloto_ciego 2 hours ago [-]
Then enlighten me.
unknownfuture 7 hours ago [-]
Because what you describe is a fantasy that will never materialize. We're headed for Elysium, not Star Trek.
piloto_ciego 2 hours ago [-]
Then what are you going to do about it? I’m going to build.
rc5150 22 hours ago [-]
Whenever somebody qualifies a statement with "trust me", my first inclination and deepest instinct is to ignore that statement. Saying it doesn't make you more believable or authoritative on... anything. Trust me.
shirro 23 hours ago [-]
I heard my 12yo uses "AI" as a synonym for crap in a context which had nothing to do with machine learning. There is a pronounced and growing disconnect between the fervently pro-AI messaging on platforms like HN and regular people. Anti-AI sentiment goes deep and has momentum. A few billion dollars of marketing and influencer spend isn't going to turn it around. When the bubble deflates as most people feel it must I think it will only reinforce the negativity.
dofm 20 hours ago [-]
> I heard my 12yo uses "AI" as a synonym for crap in a context which had nothing to do with machine learning.
The kids are alright.
jefurii 1 days ago [-]
What's so surprising? The AI CEOs hate them and are trying to destroy the world they live in along with their job prospects.
kj4211cash 23 hours ago [-]
I wonder how much of this is caused by income inequality. There are some young people I talk to that are genuinely worried about whether AI will take all the jobs. But there are a lot more that rightfully realize that they probably can't afford the middle class life their parents had and are annoyed at all the money AI is hoovering up and how rich these CEOs are. And that's the surface level. There's all sorts of resentment that hasn't really been thought through and wouldn't exist if we had the sort of real growth in lower- and middle-class incomes that we used to.
mvlipwig 21 hours ago [-]
I'm skeptical of the income inequality hypothesis as the US Gini has been mostly stagnant for 20 years (as per https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA). I'd imagine that (social|) media has a fairly large impact on this phenomenon as it makes inequality more visible than before.
If I got this right Gini measures inequality in either income or spending but as Piketty showed we have crazy rising inequality in capital / wealth.
red-iron-pine 5 hours ago [-]
been happening since the 80s mate, and everyone knows it
throwaway27448 20 hours ago [-]
These are not topics easily separated. The rich are anxious to find returns; the rest of us are anxious about furthering a wealth gap and societal dysfunction further. "AI" might as well be synonymous with both concerns.
20 hours ago [-]
cucumber3732842 22 hours ago [-]
It's not the inequality. It's the lack of hope for a better future. Nobody cares how rich the richest people are when their lives are getting better.
newsomix9xl 22 hours ago [-]
Blaming a tough job market on AI, and claiming AI pivots are the reasons for layoffs, while claiming AI can destroy humanity.
Who could have seen this coming?
Ekaros 16 hours ago [-]
Unless you are cheerleader hoping to eventually be a CEO. Why would you particularly ever like this class of people? Or in financialised economy ever trust them to do anything but to maximise some metric affecting the price of the stock or whatever.
And distrust is reasonable stance for most people. Goals of financial system don't most of time align with well being of everyone in the population.
ggoo 23 hours ago [-]
The young people are probably on to something. They are the future after all.
piskov 1 days ago [-]
“Hate” for “Don’t trust” seems like a pure clickbait material
mvlipwig 21 hours ago [-]
This is anecdotal, but "hate" is absolutely a good descriptor here
Finnucane 1 days ago [-]
The title is wrong: it is easy to believe.
2OEH8eoCRo0 1 days ago [-]
Technology is not cool anymore.
Gud 16 hours ago [-]
Technology was not cool, it was for us the nerds. The nerds started making money, so the money people got into it.
But it was never cool. Having money can fake being cool though, at least for a while.
Now the capitalists who control the technology are in bed with the government, it certainly is uncool. But in a totally different way than before.
24 hours ago [-]
mvlipwig 21 hours ago [-]
As a young person, the data I would like to see on this topic are how AI/tech CEOs compare to CEOs on other industries. I would be surprised if Nadella polled significantly lower than the median non-tech CEO, based on gen Z's opinion of CEOs.
I came across a video in my YouTube feed - “where are all the serial killers”.
Half way through the video it clicked. The presenter said that it was because we have better tools to detect and decadent behavior and traits such as psychopathy early.
But I think that most of the psychopaths are now either politicians or CEOs. They can still kill without the fear of getting caught or dirtying the hands.
Are there any CEOs people do trust? (I wonder how it compares if someone made a list of politicians)
this seems to be the list:
65% Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
70% Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg
70% Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
70% OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
70% SpaceX CEO Elon Musk
75% Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai
75% Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei
79% Palantir Chairman Peter Thiel
81% Palantir CEO Alex Karp
bagacrap 18 hours ago [-]
They are all slimeballs but how does Zuck have a non-zero trust rating?
intended 17 hours ago [-]
the data was distrust:
> Palantir’s extremely controversial CEO Alex Karp scored the lowest, with 81 percent choosing “don’t trust,” while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella fared the best — albeit with a pitiful 35 percent “trust” score.
add-sub-mul-div 24 hours ago [-]
This makes me think of last year when Adobe made a Bluesky account and got shouted off the platform within a day for no other reason than Adobe sucks. I have hope that it signals a trend that certain audiences are simply starting to exercise taste.
strenholme 21 hours ago [-]
Here’s a Reddit thread on Adobe being shouted down on BlueSky:
Not at all hard to believe young people hate billionaires who are actively trying to destroy their (young people's) futures for their (B's) own personal benefit.
And anyone who still says "oh, they'll find new jobs, Industrial Revolution, Luddites, etc." is clearly not thinking.
insane_dreamer 7 hours ago [-]
struck a nerve with the HN crowd I see :)
22 hours ago [-]
tqi 20 hours ago [-]
tldr ad funded industry claims key that ceos of competitors for clicks are "hated by young people"
Grimblewald 23 hours ago [-]
not really difficult. Genocide is a rather niche thing to like, and supporting it puts you in lockstep with those perpetrating.
echelon 1 days ago [-]
Young people don't know who AI CEOs are without the media apparatus teaching them AI is bad.
I've watched journalists dunk on this tech since the days of Tacotron. They love to dish out hate and venom and crystalize it around concepts that are easy to sell.
Not that the Dario and Sam haven't both been deliberately hyperbolic and made themselves easy targets, but the media was always attempting to do this.
Journalists hate AI and they always have.
We've seen them try dozens, if not hundreds of things to get the story to stick. Lately it's data centers being built and the stories of neighbors complaining about noise.
As much as I blame Sam for getting people angry at him, journalists also contributed to radicalizing people against him and turning him into an assassination target.
This headline is literally trying to reinforce this.
atomicnumber3 1 days ago [-]
Yeah has nothing to do with all the "permanent underclass" stuff right?
echelon 1 days ago [-]
Not gonna happen with open source.
ohyoutravel 1 days ago [-]
And yet AI CEOs preach the “AI will take your job and you’ll be homeless” narrative so hard.
toomuchtodo 1 days ago [-]
Their investment narrative, enterprise value, and potential liquidity event depends on this proclamation, regardless of how true it is.
preg_match 4 minutes ago [-]
We can't expect people to somehow deduce that AI CEOs are lying and therefore should like them.
Also, even if people DO know AI CEOs are lying... why would that make them likable? Liars are unlikable, almost as a rule. Of course people don't like and trust them.
So either AI CEOs genuinely believe the "permanent underclass" stuff, in which case you should hate them because obviously. Or they don't believe it, in which case you should hate them because they're liars. Either way they lose. The only way to win is to not say batshit insane stuff that implies everyday people will die en-masse. Which... yeah. I feel like anyone could've told them that.
vrganj 1 days ago [-]
In other words, their class interest is in conflict with the vast majority of the world.
Wonder why people can't stand them.
breadramen 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
1 days ago [-]
ydat 9 hours ago [-]
Don’t worry, we’ll find the cure for autism.
sublinear 1 days ago [-]
A significant portion of the population didn't need journalists feeding them a negative opinion.
More people alive today are educated in computer science than ever before. The same is true of epistemology, linguistics, and broader philosophy. Many have also lived long enough to see previous waves of AI come and go.
People were already watching the topic closely over a decade ago with DeepMind, AlphaGo, etc. None of the arguments against the current AI methods are new. People were poking holes in statistical methods centuries ago.
Mainstream media just waits for the right time to pounce and attempt to sway everyone else who is uncertain or out of the loop. They actually started out with a pro-AI stance. That in no way implies the majority was ever out of the loop or believed in any of the hype. The public are not a flock of baby birds waiting for their empty minds to be fed.
The majority doesn't even care about the principle of the matter. They are far more interested in whether it actually works reliably. The appeals to emotion, political bias, or ego are wildly out of touch and outdated. What you're observing today with young people is not that they have different "opinions", but that they are burned out on all opinions. We forced them to become so much more sophisticated and discerning by pressing that button too many times. You'd be just as cynical if you spent your childhood watching an iPad deliver endless ragebait.
Razengan 23 hours ago [-]
More likely it's the politicians and lawyers etc. that are afraid of AI empowering the peasant class, so they're telling the commoners to divert their angst against AI.
Oh AI will take our jobs..? LET IT!!
Who wants to work all your life and still not be able to afford a house?
Instead of asking to be wage slaves your entire lives, demand your politicians to give you UBI.
smegger001 23 hours ago [-]
>Oh AI will take our jobs..? LET IT!!
Except people still need to eat and.pay for a roof over their heaf
>Who wants to work all your life and still not be able to afford a house?
That is the fear they have from ai
>Instead of asking to be wage slaves your entire lives, demand your politicians to give you UBI.
Except the same people leading these companies do everytjing thaey can to avoid paying taxes that could fund ubi.
Elons whole Doge fiasco, the google guys fighting wealth taxes in california all fights against helping the people they are displacing. The tech ceos talk a good game about an ai powered life of luxury and ease but its not for you and me its for them and fuck the proles.
DecoPerson 1 days ago [-]
The Butlerian Jihad is coming. It will happen sooner than we think. It will start with Australia, where the popular vote matters the most for political power. “Vote for the Greens! We’ll ban AI! We’ll bring your jobs back! Your savings account will earn interest again! The AI scams will stop!” All false promises, of course. The laws will be pathetic: “Prohibited digital intelligence — any digital system capable of learning, adapting, remembering, recalling, generating, or interpreting information of a textual, visual, audio, interactive or other form.” It will be the Minister’s choice regarding which companies are in the (new) enforcement agency’s crosshairs. Misunderstood situations (like a Tesla running over a child that it didn’t detect) will be used as the war cry. “AI is dangerous! AI cannot be trusted! AI is being used by criminals!”
I hope my prediction is wrong.
legobmw99 24 hours ago [-]
A democratic movement leading to increased regulation, even if you think such a thing would be misguided, is hardly a jihad…
binary132 24 hours ago [-]
If there will be any Butlerian Anything, it will be a reaction to the excruciatingly pathetic attempts at legislating the problem into a slightly smaller problem.
chillfox 23 hours ago [-]
That actually sounds pretty good to me.
voidmain0001 1 days ago [-]
I doubt any of the cited CEOs will care. “And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off (whoo-hoo-hoo)” - Taylor Swift.
throwaway27448 1 days ago [-]
I don't think anyone is worried about a CEO's ego, lol. Society can only protect them so much in a material sense... just ask Brian Thompson.
lukewarm707 23 hours ago [-]
after the rise comes the fall.
arjie 1 days ago [-]
These popularity contests are won and lost based on marketing content on TikTok. If the opinions of young people were relevant they'd be appropriately shifted on demand. Few of them are reasoned positions so they can be shifted one way or the other with targeted advertising.
bagacrap 18 hours ago [-]
If you had not noticed, these AI companies already are advertising very heavily directly at the youth. OpenAi in particular is trying really hard to convince the college age crowd they are cool, though others (Google, Anthropic) have followed suit.
bogzz 22 hours ago [-]
And this kind of thinking is part of the reason behind the hatred.
sthkr 1 days ago [-]
Automation is such an old concept invented back in the 1st century AD. Furthermore, I don't see people hating the CEOs of Siemens, Honeywell, Schneider Electric, ABB, Yokogawa, Emerson, Allen Bradley, GE Fanuc, Kuka, Hyundia, Mitsubishi etc. They've been automating entire industries & manufacturing with their controllers (PLCs, DCS etc), SCADA, HMI & systems for decades. The first PLC was invented by General Motors back in 1968. China has entire dark factories making phones and their electric cars. The media is only crying now because their cushy office, journalism and art jobs are slowly going away.
lithocarpus 24 hours ago [-]
Even to whatever extent this is what's happening, a stopped clock is right twice a day applies.
add-sub-mul-div 1 days ago [-]
I don't come down on anyone for failing to foresee how the web 2.0/social-media/streaming eras would evolve to be used against us more than for us. I'm as guilty as anyone. But in 2026 there's no excuse for failing to apply lessons from the last decade or two to extrapolate where AI is going.
insane_dreamer 4 hours ago [-]
I'm honestly tired of these comments as they fail to understand what is happening today is not the same as what happened 50 years ago.
For the past few decades people have been told over and over: no more factory? no problem! that was backbreaking work better done by robots anyway. go to college, study really hard, get a degree and you'll get a better paying job that leverages your cognitive skills. Remember all those "I was a metalworker and transitioned to web developer" stories?
And now, all of a sudden they're being told, "oops, those jobs that leveraged your cognitive skills are going away too now" (and not because we're saving humanity or some noble reason, but so rich tech companies and their share holders can get richer), and "no, we have no idea what, if any, new jobs will emerge for you".
HDBaseT 21 hours ago [-]
Yes, and when they replaced the manual slow looms with fast machines, people lost jobs, people went homeless, families were destroyed.
Unless there is a mechanism to convert the extra revenue from machines back to humans, the money just filters to the top 1% of the 1%. Unfortunately, that has effectively never been the case in history. Job displacement is the real late stage capitalism.
These people are so disconnected from reality.
The paying/selling part will be transitory. Right now the people paying for it are investors, and they're selling a cost-cutting dream to executive managers.
If someone builds a machine that automated all the jobs, they've have amassed an unprecedented amount of power, even if the economy is in ruins for everyone else. They won't need to sell anything to anyone.
> What stops the rest of humanity from turning data centers into a pile of ash?
AI slaughterbots. Think the Ukraine front line, but completely automated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
The implicit deal is that they can keep extracting the value from us as long as they keep tossing us enough scraps.
They show every intention of claiming a bigger piece of the pie in return for basically nothing, and that kind of shit will lead to an unstable system eventually.
Even with AGI robots smarter than us I think there's a good chance it would go like the Antebellum South with robots replacing the slaves and humans planning their debutantes balls.
It’s not purely that people shift to other jobs, it’s what jobs and where. A union manufacturing job and retail cashier job at dollar tree are not equivalent. And when the whole core of a company moves they aren’t replaced.
The real number is work force participation. It’s down. Alot. Economic share of wages is down. Alot.
1. As you say, new jobs of what sort, with what labor power, and at what pay?
Offshoring manufacturing was as much about breaking US labor unions as anything else. No unions in China, and no bad press about feuding with US workers. Just 'oops, new economic reality, things change, so sorry'.
Making high value add jobs disappear and replacing them with only low value add jobs isn't a net gain.
2. What mechanism do people see realistically distributing hypothetical bountiful gains from AI-boosted productivity?
Let's imagine AI works out perfectly: productivity gains through the roof, entire industries automated, record corporate profits across the board.
What plausible path do people see from that (and the unemployment it spiked) to most people being given a chunk of the profits?
Remember: they're already legally spoken for by the shareholders.
Introducing new corporate tax rates at the federal level? Ha!
And even if UBI manages the get through in some form... how much do you think that will be?
Which is to say, how much of their wealth do you think the richest will be willing to part with to redistribute?
Because history says as little as they can get away with.
The only thing I would say is that shareholders don’t have an exclusive legal right to profit. That is a policy choice and one that has shifted over time (American law has moved to the extreme shareholder maximizing end of the spectrum) and is currently different in other countries (Germany has a corporate governance structure that Requires an employee and union board of directors so it isn’t just shareholders interests that are represented in governance decisions.
None of those technological shifts affected so many of the jobs at once, nor did they simultaneously threaten many of the alternative jobs for those affected.
> Even with AGI robots smarter than us I think there's a good chance it would go like the Antebellum South with robots replacing the slaves and humans planning their debutantes balls.
Ok. So you have a small number of planters with big estates, what happens to all the other people (e.g. the "slaves" and other worksers, after the planters no longer need them)?
Wealth is not distributed evenly enough for such a fantasy. Dario Amodei and Sam Altman will be able to go play planter. Me? Not so much.
It's an apt metaphor, but probably not in the way parent intended it. History says there will certainly be hoarders of wealth... and then everyone else.
> in all the land, two-thirds will be cut off and perish, but one-third will be left alive
e.g. game reviewer ssethtzentach added it to his most recent video, etc.
the messaging is following a similar trend as qanon, you can tell there is a broad effort to get this trickling into popular consciousness, though it's hard to tell if this is to get people to accept it or fight it
I’m not saying Anthropic and OpenAI are going to be the ones to deliver it - but…you really don’t see the ubiquitous need for these?
if there’s less work to be done for everyone to have what they need, that would be considered a benefit by governed society, and universal basic income will likely be rolled out.
Not necessarily. It's not going to be evenly distributed. It's not like today, but everyone works 4 hours a week. Some dudes will work 80, others won't work at all. That situation is what's most adventitious to shareholders.
> and universal basic income will likely be rolled out.
If UBI even happens, it's going to enable a poverty-level existence.
Thing of all the things you enjoy doing, that you wouldn't be able to afford if you were in poverty. That's UBI life.
literally the ones related to this very site
If even one of those assumptions is no longer true, nothing works. And when I mean nothing, I mean nothing. Money doesn’t work, rent doesn’t work, debt doesn’t work, labor doesn’t work, production doesn’t work. It would have to be a quick de-industrialization unless we have a plan. No more monkey-patching with social programs, this is an entire paradigm shift.
Blinding need. We don’t have time for each other like we used to.
You can do business without workers, investors, shareholders. You can't do business without consumers.
why would businesses need everybody to participate when a specific portion of people are enough?
> why would businesses need everybody to participate when a specific portion of people are enough?
For business nothing is ever enough. It creates products and customers for them out of thin air. The only required thing is money in the consumer pocket. Business itself is going to pressure governments to give more people more money, by whatever means necessary, so it can scoop it up off of them.
What even some millionaires now realize is that it's very hard to take the money away from other millionaires. They don't spend that much. But if you tax them and give the money to consumers, suddenly, as a rich person, you have clear path to taking this money for yourself, just by having a successful customer facing business.
That (among other things) is why some rich advocate for higher taxation of the rich.
If everyone around you is poor it's very hard to get any richer yourself, regardless of how much you already have. And rich people like getting richer most of all.
Spot on. So that's the main point that needs to be addressed. Or rather expanded upon. Because already a ton of people get awarded purchasing power without doing any useful economic activity.
And it's gonna be expanded because without purchasing power we can't play the game called business. And people like business, because it makes some of them richer and richer.
We have to stop fearing the machines and start fearing the firmware running on our brains! It's capitalism that's the problem, not the robots... if anything the robots can liberate us from capital's death grip!
Jobs will become even more scarce, so how does that follow?
>robots can liberate us from capital's death grip
We are already live in a world sufficiently technologically advanced to feed and house everyone, and yet we don't.
We can literally take it from them. I get why people don't like to think about that sort of thing, but... yeah. We could make AI a sort of public good and do something like the Permanent Fund Dividend or something. There's lots of options even in the "reformist" way of thinking about it. But we shouldn't be naive.
The binary thinking in this thread and the lack of creativity is just... astounding to me.
(Also... LOL.)
a ding to the social credit score but not enough for a drone or ICE team to be dispatched to your address. but that might change.
The Chinese models are able to distill outputs into a model of slightly worse performance within a few weeks of each release, and the same copyright exemptions which protect these guys scraping also protect China.
As long as their lobbyists don't win (and the deck is stacked against them, make no mistake) the future of AI is not going to be owned by the frontier labs.
(Or maybe I'm just projecting.)
say what you will about uber but it is a seamless service. there are a lot of great apps out there.
now tech isn't making things better it's rapidly converting to aggressive rent seeking, and everyone can see it.
only a rube thinks Big Tech is going to make tomorrow better for everyone.
AI isn’t a new iPhone moment, it’s a fire moment. Dario Amodei didn’t bring it into existence, physics did — we’re just slowly working out the cognitive science for the first time after Crysis machines ended up being really good at something that our type of intelligence relies on (intuitive framing via huge neural networks — see The Frame Problem).
Also this doesn’t really matter in anthropic’s case, but FWIW: we should try to blame CEOs a bit less, and shareholders (capitalists) a lot more. Our system isn’t named ‘officerism’, after all!
So kind also of Physics himself to have gone to such trouble, to have invented all these brilliant GPUs in the first place, synthesized trillions of dollars to build the data centers to hold them, and burned the midnight electrons mining all that coal and natural gas to fuel the power plants it built too.
All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds in which inevitability steers our destiny. You know, I've really been considering getting a lobotomy myself. I guess it's a pretty grand idea that thinking is now categorically outmoded. But then again I might really should have done it when they were cheaper in 2010, because Physics had it all under control anyway!
The fundamental delusion of this take is why we are suffering this lunacy. When the crash happens after the circular ponzi scheme hanging all its risk on the public breaks apart the hatred for these lunatics will be justified.
But then I guess the lunatics would simply claim that they didn't have enough situational awareness as they run away with our tax money after the bailout.
It's hard to see why basically anyone would at this point.
Do you remember when the AI CEOs spoke at college graduations? They got flustered when they were booed, they literally didn't understand why they were being booed.
And these CEOs have very little to do with creating and improving said companies' products. The repeated outlandish claims kind of definitely broke this illusion.
Maybe that won’t happen, but these CEOs not only tell us it will happen, they have the gall to brag about it. Of course that’s unpopular.
“Yeah I plan to basically torture most of the world’s population until they eventually die. Except the elite few who hold the AI means of production. Wait, why are you booing?”
Uber made the taxi experience way worse and less predictable.
Now, I can’t just walk out of a bar, get into a clean taxi and go home, I have to fiddle with an app, wait, wave trying to identify “my” ride, then hope it’s clean and safe. It’s a nightmare compared to what we had before.
Uber eats made food delivery significantly worse and more expensive.
It used to be that I could get food delivered for a known fixed price, it would arrive while still hot and it would be delivered to the door. Now, the price is obfuscated, there’s an extra fee for getting the food warm, sometimes the drinks are spilled into the bag, delivery is to the curb so I have to go outside to get it.
There’s a lot more that has been made worse by tech companies.
Are you old enough to remember the bad old days?
I should also mention we tried to use their version of Uber (DiDi), but I suspect there was some kind of price-fixing attempt there because no taxis would come for the price that they suggested. We had the option of upping our price until someone came and then I gave up on the service.
My other experiences were some years back in upstate New York, where there were also questionable practices, and you really had to look over the driver’s shoulder. They tried to control scams with payments based on zones, and the drivers would bend the rules when possible.
Again the overwhelming majority of my taxi rides were fine. The overwhelming majority of my Uber rides are also fine. But when things go wrong they definitely went wrong worse with taxis than Uber rides for me.
I'm old enough to remember them. I very much preferred the "bad old days" over bad new days of ride-sharing services.
You can still hail cabs off the street, it’s just that it’s an inefficient way of getting a ride.
Using uber I will immediately see the price up front and I can tailor the cab to my needs and price.
And at best you could get pizza delivered. Now everything can be delivered. Just because sometimes the drivers mess up doesn't mean overall it's worse.
Neither of your examples are good ones for your point.
In my opinion, the moment tech perception flipped from "it's kind of cool" to "I don't trust it" was E. Snowden in 2013.
For more than one decade now, we have progressively switched to treating tech more like a cigarette addiction we should keep in check (even if we don't succeed) rather than the qualify of life improvement, communication & entertainment tool it could be.
And tech companies don't care anymore. We went from Google's "don't be evil" to CEO's clamoring they will maybe make us jobless, and potentially kill us all, with Uber & Amazon's run of the mill human exploitation in the middle for good measure.
edit: There are solutions to this. See link.
Why can't anyone see beyond their job?
Maybe you can't see that, but for a good many people hovering about the knife edge of just getting by such things are a pressing concern.
Perhaps in future Halcyon days when all needs are met joy will be had by all .. right now there's a looming gap of uncertainty for many.
Like, I lost literally everything when I got sick. I think I probably understand "hovering about the knife edge" better than most people on this site. I lost my career, my sense of identity, and more than most can imagine. When you have faced explaining to your son how you might not make it through treatment and how he'll be responsible for a lot of things I am responsible for going forward, you kind of look at these people whining about AI codegen and sigh. This freaking technological miracle that might make their jobs obsolete so they're afraid of it, those people are as children who cannot see that it could literally free them from stupid bullshit... You people are not your jobs, you're not your salary and your job at ServiceNow or SalesForce or whatever can never love you back. The robot isn't a threat to you, the system that values the robot more than you is. It's basic root cause analysis.
But I bounced back. I fought through it. I kept on slogging through the stress and catastrophe. This whole thing feels like the meme to me, "oh, fist time?"
You know what I learned though? That we are not always powerless to act. We can get up and go. We can create! We can just do stuff. People need to realize that they have agency! Your life can get better if you get to continue it (hopefully). You are allowed to live how you want to live, you can do things! You don't have to accept being fed dog shit every day. How many of these people bitching and moaning about AI have even thought to try to form a union? How many of these people vote? How many of these people get off their assess and go and participate in some direct action? How many?
Dammit, why don't I see anyone in the street protesting the war? Why don't I see anyone protesting the lack of social safety nets? Why don't I see anyone doing anything. You know why? Because doing things is hard. Because most people want things to change without putting in any of the work (sometimes dangerous, sometimes stressful) to change things. And meanwhile, I see AI - which could literally be a tool we use to fix the injustices of the world, the disaster of tying people's right to exist to their pay check - that NONSENSE that we mostly all hate, and the response is "oh my god what if it takes my job?" or so-called "leftists" bending over backwards to defend copyright law.
These people complaining don't want the system to change, they just want to maintain a privileged position within it. But if the system has always been harming people at the margins, is it ok if we go back? "Oh, thank goodness we made AI illegal so I can still have to fill out my manual TPS reports and report to Bob on my progress for the week! How great is that!" The lack of imagination of a better world is astounding and disheartening. The whiners and perpetual malcontents shouting about AI secretly want to be the billionaire, not overthrow a system that allows them in the first place. They want their previously privileged status as a "knowledge worker" to remain special.
Man, am I the only one in here who read Marx? Bell Hooks? Kropotkin? Dream bigger people!
>dreams of man made famine and desolation
Do you happen to wear glasses, mister Ciego? Me and my marx reading boys have some bourgeois liquidation quotas to fill.
I’m not a Marxist, but jeepers, it should be required reading of people.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilbara_strike
Just because something is inevitable doesn't mean the people whose family's lives get fucked up along the way are somehow assholes or unrealistic for demanding that we handle it in a more controlled/extended way that doesn't cause so much misery.
Your - piloto_ciego - needs will never be met by the abundance of the planet. Perhaps your great great great grandchildren may begin to live in such a free way, but you and everyone else alive now will not. There are too many people on the planet, wealth is too unevenly distributed, food production is too unevenly distributed, water is too unevenly distributed, energy production is too unevenly distributed; the only way anyone can get their needs met is by participating in an economy which can allocate and relocate those scarce resources.
All AI is doing is taking an increasingly large share of those resources in pursuit of ensuring the survival of an ouroboros of circular funding between a tiny number of companies to the detriment of everyone else attempting to participate in that economy.
AI may or may not prove to be a significant step on the ladder to the ultimate end of scarcity, but there is no possible way that anyone you could conceivably meet, much less be, will ever experience the kind of life liberated from toil that you wish for.
Electricity promised to eliminate toil and bring us a life of leisure. It did not. Perhaps all technologies have this potential, AI included. That potential will never be realized because relentless and perpetual growth is a necessary precondition and justification for the development and expansion of such technologies, and that growth demands and consumes whatever excess human capacity that the technology freed up.
The best you can hope for is to exploit the technology selfishly, carving out a life of scholarly pursuit and passion projects while rent-seeking on top of the economic work of humans who couldn't get there as fast as you. But that has been an option since the invention of money.
> Electricity promised to eliminate toil and bring us a life of leisure. It did not. Perhaps all technologies have this potential, AI included. That potential will never be realized because relentless and perpetual growth is a necessary precondition and justification for the development and expansion of such technologies, and that growth demands and consumes whatever excess human capacity that the technology freed up.
Also, this speaks to me as someone who has never used used a screw driver to turn a screw into a board. The drill driver has made it amazingly better.
EDIT to add:
Also, I've lived a subsistence lifestyle before, I'm fairly close to doing it again though I'll still need some money to roll through the household? Dream bigger buddy. It's not all doom and gloom.
Ironically, this oversimplification is narrow-minded.
Such games may involve property taxes, eminent domain, or similar.
You are inadvertently proving my point. Yes an impact driver makes it easier to get a screw into a board, but a carpenter still works a full day. Technology's reducing effect on labor effort is always used to increase output, never to decrease input.
> Dream bigger
I am awake.
Dream bigger. You're not awake, you're clinging to a fantasy where you get to be a special privileged member of society. That is done. We're not going back.
You can sit here moaning about how you used to be special and important, or you can start doing the hard work of building a society where not having a job doesn't put your very survival at risk.
> or you can start doing the hard work of building a society where not having a job doesn't put your very survival at risk.
Escaping to a forest cabin might well be hard work but it helps nobody other than yourself. You are escaping from society, not building a new one. Your comments about privilege are deeply misplaced.
The kids are alright.
If I got this right Gini measures inequality in either income or spending but as Piketty showed we have crazy rising inequality in capital / wealth.
Who could have seen this coming?
And distrust is reasonable stance for most people. Goals of financial system don't most of time align with well being of everyone in the population.
But it was never cool. Having money can fake being cool though, at least for a while.
Now the capitalists who control the technology are in bed with the government, it certainly is uncool. But in a totally different way than before.
Half way through the video it clicked. The presenter said that it was because we have better tools to detect and decadent behavior and traits such as psychopathy early.
But I think that most of the psychopaths are now either politicians or CEOs. They can still kill without the fear of getting caught or dirtying the hands.
https://youtu.be/iRgin1tWIT8
this seems to be the list:
> Palantir’s extremely controversial CEO Alex Karp scored the lowest, with 81 percent choosing “don’t trust,” while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella fared the best — albeit with a pitiful 35 percent “trust” score.
https://old.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/1juptdx/adob...
If that doesn’t open (Reddit has become a walled garden):
https://archive.ph/20260817024427/https://www.reddit.com/r/B...
And anyone who still says "oh, they'll find new jobs, Industrial Revolution, Luddites, etc." is clearly not thinking.
I've watched journalists dunk on this tech since the days of Tacotron. They love to dish out hate and venom and crystalize it around concepts that are easy to sell.
Not that the Dario and Sam haven't both been deliberately hyperbolic and made themselves easy targets, but the media was always attempting to do this.
Journalists hate AI and they always have.
We've seen them try dozens, if not hundreds of things to get the story to stick. Lately it's data centers being built and the stories of neighbors complaining about noise.
As much as I blame Sam for getting people angry at him, journalists also contributed to radicalizing people against him and turning him into an assassination target.
This headline is literally trying to reinforce this.
Also, even if people DO know AI CEOs are lying... why would that make them likable? Liars are unlikable, almost as a rule. Of course people don't like and trust them.
So either AI CEOs genuinely believe the "permanent underclass" stuff, in which case you should hate them because obviously. Or they don't believe it, in which case you should hate them because they're liars. Either way they lose. The only way to win is to not say batshit insane stuff that implies everyday people will die en-masse. Which... yeah. I feel like anyone could've told them that.
Wonder why people can't stand them.
More people alive today are educated in computer science than ever before. The same is true of epistemology, linguistics, and broader philosophy. Many have also lived long enough to see previous waves of AI come and go.
People were already watching the topic closely over a decade ago with DeepMind, AlphaGo, etc. None of the arguments against the current AI methods are new. People were poking holes in statistical methods centuries ago.
Mainstream media just waits for the right time to pounce and attempt to sway everyone else who is uncertain or out of the loop. They actually started out with a pro-AI stance. That in no way implies the majority was ever out of the loop or believed in any of the hype. The public are not a flock of baby birds waiting for their empty minds to be fed.
The majority doesn't even care about the principle of the matter. They are far more interested in whether it actually works reliably. The appeals to emotion, political bias, or ego are wildly out of touch and outdated. What you're observing today with young people is not that they have different "opinions", but that they are burned out on all opinions. We forced them to become so much more sophisticated and discerning by pressing that button too many times. You'd be just as cynical if you spent your childhood watching an iPad deliver endless ragebait.
Oh AI will take our jobs..? LET IT!!
Who wants to work all your life and still not be able to afford a house?
Instead of asking to be wage slaves your entire lives, demand your politicians to give you UBI.
Except people still need to eat and.pay for a roof over their heaf
>Who wants to work all your life and still not be able to afford a house?
That is the fear they have from ai
>Instead of asking to be wage slaves your entire lives, demand your politicians to give you UBI.
Except the same people leading these companies do everytjing thaey can to avoid paying taxes that could fund ubi.
Elons whole Doge fiasco, the google guys fighting wealth taxes in california all fights against helping the people they are displacing. The tech ceos talk a good game about an ai powered life of luxury and ease but its not for you and me its for them and fuck the proles.
I hope my prediction is wrong.
For the past few decades people have been told over and over: no more factory? no problem! that was backbreaking work better done by robots anyway. go to college, study really hard, get a degree and you'll get a better paying job that leverages your cognitive skills. Remember all those "I was a metalworker and transitioned to web developer" stories?
And now, all of a sudden they're being told, "oops, those jobs that leveraged your cognitive skills are going away too now" (and not because we're saving humanity or some noble reason, but so rich tech companies and their share holders can get richer), and "no, we have no idea what, if any, new jobs will emerge for you".
Unless there is a mechanism to convert the extra revenue from machines back to humans, the money just filters to the top 1% of the 1%. Unfortunately, that has effectively never been the case in history. Job displacement is the real late stage capitalism.