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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
They "believe" that for the sake of their stock options and IPOs, not out of any actual belief.
I think they know it’s not soon as they promise so they lie openly.
If there isn't an appropriate metaphor in the Silmarillion he's not going to have thought about it.
And, idk what is the end goal here. Even if 20% of people lose their job the crime and prostitution will shoot up....
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?
How will we be able to have those when we have no job and no home and no money?
Ain't going to happen and you know it.
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.
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.
“Not with that attitude!”
You also just explained how people fearing that AI will take all jobs are equally disconnected from reality. Although in less joyful manner.
what kind of bargaining power will you have with "well someone must consume!"?
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.
TBH the promise of many technologies has been making work redundant. But they used to be more diplomatic about it.
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!
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.
>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.
It’s amusing to imagine the oligarchs are going to anymore charitable than currently.
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.
Oh yeah don’t be naive, but we’ll just take what we want. Ok bro.
I mean, we've done it before lol
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.
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.)
Talk about shooting the messenger…
A CEO of a large AI company is hardly just a "messenger" here. Come on now.
He is just the poor little head of the snake.
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!
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!!
Anthropic has not been “fueling the fire”. They’re the reason most of y’all even know there’s a fire.
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.
The CEO of a major AI company is not “the messenger”
He's the guy doing the thing that he is delivering the message about...
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.
Because the products these companies produce are extremely popular, and people benefit from them.
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.
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.
They are widely used but not liked and net benefits are arguable.
They are liked by many though. And net benefits are arguable
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?”
You are a good example of how the media hijacked you
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The taxi experience was pretty great where I live and where I traveled. I guess we were experiencing different parts of the world.
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.
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.
TV has unskippable and targeted commercials now. The list goes on and on.
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.
Complaining with the angle of "cold pizzas and spilled cola" fills a bit of touch when considering the human exploitation on the other side.
My experience with Uber is the opposite, FWIW.
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.
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.
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 a crisis of trust, on that point I do find myself agreeing with Dario. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323245
edit: There are solutions to this. See link.
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?
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.
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!
>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.
You ever read Marx?
I’m not a Marxist, but jeepers, it should be required reading of people.
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.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilbara_strike
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
You're probably right about (social) media being a factor but overindexing on Gini. Here's a chart that shows dramatically rising wealth gaps in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...
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.
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.
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.
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.
What's so surprising? The AI CEOs hate them and are trying to destroy the world they live in along with their job prospects.
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?
“Hate” for “Don’t trust” seems like a pure clickbait material
This is anecdotal, but "hate" is absolutely a good descriptor here
The young people are probably on to something. They are the future after all.
The title is wrong: it is easy to believe.
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:
They are all slimeballs but how does Zuck have a non-zero trust rating?
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.
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.
According to Blind he did with only 30% (2023) https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1961mql/best_...
Technology is not cool anymore.
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.
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.
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.
And this kind of thinking is part of the reason behind the hatred.
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.
Here’s a Reddit thread on Adobe being shouted down on BlueSky:
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...
tldr ad funded industry claims key that ceos of competitors for clicks are "hated by young people"
not really difficult. Genocide is a rather niche thing to like, and supporting it puts you in lockstep with those perpetrating.
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.
Yeah has nothing to do with all the "permanent underclass" stuff right?
Not gonna happen with open source.
And yet AI CEOs preach the “AI will take your job and you’ll be homeless” narrative so hard.
Their investment narrative, enterprise value, and potential liquidity event depends on this proclamation, regardless of how true it is.
In other words, their class interest is in conflict with the vast majority of the world.
Wonder why people can't stand them.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
A democratic movement leading to increased regulation, even if you think such a thing would be misguided, is hardly a jihad…
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.
That actually sounds pretty good to me.
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.
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.
after the rise comes the fall.
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.
Even to whatever extent this is what's happening, a stopped clock is right twice a day applies.
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.
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.