It's not AI. Like the layoffs AI is a convenient scapegoat for the economy creaking to a halt, real world income across most sectors won't buy a house in the state where the job is. It's hate, but it's only "against AI" because AI is being trotted out why people can't get their first home until they are 50 if they are lucky..
I remember reading about superstitious behavior in pigeons.
You feed pigeons randomly, and if they happened to be standing on one foot when they got fed, they will associate that behavior with what happened. So they will stand on one foot while feeding.
In the same way, they economy goes bad, they might blame what they read about the government, or AI, or standing on one foot.
I think that the creepiness of the tech CEOs that show up in media has a ton to do with this too, as they seem like cartoonish villians.
Alex Karp, in particular, has some of the most absolutely horrifying clips of his TV appearances circulating all over video social media. But Musk has broader reach, and is even more oblivious and has tied himself to someone who he himself accused of pedophilia.
Andreesen, Thiel, Sam Altman, and the above are great at raising valuations for investors but they are doing it incredibly stupidly in a way that leads to massive backlash. California is voting for a billionaire tax this year, and I think that these tech CEOs only have themselves to blame for the backlash they are causing.
It might not be your intention, but your comment seems to imply that the problem here is more image than substance.
The problem isn't that these people are simply inarticulate and incapable of expressing their views in ways that appeal to people. It's that their views are unappealing (if not downright objectionable) to most people.
It's a sign of how disempowered the populace is that these selfish ghouls don't even feel the need to pretend to be decent functioning adults anymore. Because, why bother? What is anyone gonna do about it?
I agree fully with your second paragraph. But regardless of what the core ideas are, they way they have been presented has been abominable, and the politics is judged on the presentation, because the US media largely presents these words unfiltered and without context and completely along the lines of the message that the US tech CEOs want to present.
I think you are both right. It is true that people only hate these people because of their actual views, but also it doesn't help that they made themselves celebrities and go on social media for attention.
I bet you there are people equally repulsive and influential but face little public backlash because they never show up in front of a camera.
As I understand it, the last sentence stems from the fact that too large of a share of the total wealth is in the hands of those that don't benefit from more homes. AI is what's prioritised by them and what will lead to even smaller flow from the efficient wealth aggregators to those needing homes, once most of the simpler office work becomes obsolete, because, let's be real, average person's reasoning, work-pay efficiency, obedience and meticulousness shouldn't be too hard to surpass with AI in a few years. AI also makes it easier to prevent a change in status quo, while being harmful to the environment and decreasing the share of current-level-of-above-average-quality-user-oriented output.
So yeah, money becoming less of a proxy of "how much someone contributed to society" and more "how much someone contributed to the oligarchs' goals", while those goals are for AI and for peoples' detriment, makes the situation actually about AI.
The technology that helps extract wealth improves, while most of the purely consumer-oriented products are becoming a con and a scam, especially if US companies are involved. The Mirabell's "original" recipe turned the best treat in the world into a generic candy, all are just palm oil + sugar + shrinkflation. There is also non-repairable tech with non-standard components, non-removable batteries, meat gets filled with water, washing machines die right after warranty ends, every digital service is trying to steal data instead of taking only the necessary or at least being transparent about what's taken and why, entertainment like Reddit and streaming services also get worse... AI slop is just another example, but a bit more visible and with a bit more side-effects.
> AI also makes it easier to prevent a change in status quo
This seems like the polar opposite of what the "AI safety" people are worried about and it seems unlikely that they could both be true at once.
> As I understand it, the last sentence stems from the fact that too large of a share of the total wealth is in the hands of those that don't benefit from more homes. AI is what's prioritised by them and what will lead to even smaller flow from the efficient wealth aggregators to those needing homes
These are both two independent things and two independent sets of people.
The main group of people opposing housing construction is landlords and existing homeowners. The ones doing AI have almost no overlap with that. Moreover, "you get paid less" and "housing costs more due to artificial scarcity" are only tied together in the sense that money going to landlords and banks isn't going to workers, which again isn't the AI thing.
Or to put it a different way, you could mitigate a lot of the "AI problems" by building more housing and the AI people would be pretty fine with that.
I have to wonder sometimes if the people of the US will ever realize that their housing shortages are self-inflicted. It seems like a massive number of people have somehow been hypnotized into thinking that building more homes increases home prices.
By coincidence the United States isn’t the only country Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have the same problem lack of affordability for people between 18 and 35 who can’t afford to buy a house/home.
Notice that all these countries are English speaking countries? Aside from speaking English they also have lots in common when it comes to the way the economy and society is run. I can only speak for the United States, but I’ve noticed unfordable not luxury apartments going up everywhere and starter homes are not.
The price to income ratio is influenced more by income than housing prices, because housing prices have a floor in terms of construction materials costs, and then countries in deep poverty are going to have a grisly ratio. For example, Cuba has some of the lowest housing costs in the world, but it's #4 on the list for worst price to income ratio. Nigeria is at #1 because their median income is $825/year rather than because they inhibit housing construction.
The issue is, why does it cost several times as much to add a housing unit in the US as it does in Mexico? That can't be explained by the cost of lumber or copper since they're tradable commodities and if it was labor then prefabricated components should be driving down the price unless it's some kind of a racket. Which implies that it's mainly rackets and zoning restrictions.
I suppose the message is that although housing (and health care and higher education) costs in the US (and elsewhere) have outpaced wage growth for the last half century or so, it could still be worse living in a country with much lower wages to begin with.
It is absolutely self-inflicted. Most major US cities made the choice to massively limit dense housing construction through zoning and permitting in the 70s-80s, and then shifted into complete amnesia mode and/or active denialism about why population numbers were suddenly growing much faster than housing construction rates.
Right. It's not AI. It's the corporations behavior in relation to AI. But most people have no experience or interaction with AI outside of corporate services or AI features in things that shouldn't have AI or make it worse (like phone support). So in their lived experience all AI sucks and you can't blame 'em for that perception.
But the real villains here are the same as ever, the most dangerous non-human persons: corporate persons.
"What people have" is robustly measured, well-understood, and pretty much all available evidence suggests that people (at least in the US and developed countries) are doing better than ever on most important metrics. But it is not as seductive as "everything is terrible"!
> doing better than ever on most important metrics
I'd say the most important metrics are those that matter to people, not those that other people say should matter to them. Births are going down, suicide is going up, but they're just drama queens, we ran the numbers... that is what turns mere criticism into hatred.
Less and less people own a bigger and bigger share of wealth, and they're too often not decent people who respect democracy and the fact that they're still just one person, not a particularly special one, and still only have one vote. No, many of them are not content with that, and have assaulted the people ever since they successfully fought for the few worker's rights they have now. That is bad enough, and not even close to the full picture. That "it used to be worse" in some metrics isn't relevant, what matters is now, how it is because of robber barons, and how it would be without them.
If someone steals most of your shit but leave you with more than "people used to have, on average, in historic times", you wouldn't be placated by that. Because, weirdly enough, you don't view yourself as a mere abstraction to be talked about that way, and billions of other people don't view themselves that way either.
Look, don’t know what to tell you, there is lots of extremely reliable well vetted and well understood information about the welfare of people on this planet and in what directions it is moving. Pretending information is imaginary or offensively abstract because you’re upset about income inequality (which is even more of an abstraction) is not good or helpful.
Sorry to sound harsh, but you are out of touch. Many social metrics are very complex objectively and are not accounted for by "robust measuring", and this is the biggest example there ever was. Data is king where it can describe reality - but the elephant in the room is that data can't describe reality in some very high-profile societal contexts, and pretending it can is dangerous with a capital D.
You will never break through the thousands of hours of doomer bullshit people are fed on TikTok all day. The post you first responded to, for instance, is talking about not being able to afford a home in the entire state they work in, which is obviously ridiculous, but it feeds the same "woe is me" bullshit from people whose only outlet for existential angst is now bitching about how poor they think they'll be in five years when they turn 18.
Basically all the data we have about people’s actual reality (including and especially what they say they are experiencing first hand) does not match the dire descriptions of the people I’m replying to.
Where are you getting your numbers from because the stock market has ceased to be linked to reality for the last decade. Trump fired the stats and numbers office. The only numbers we have are "trust me" numbers which are completely false. Most people would agree that the economy has ground to a halt and everyone I know complains about the gas prices and grocery prices. The reality is there are a lot of people out of work that aren't factored into unemployment numbers because we can't accurately calculate unemployment numbers anymore.
Whether most people agree is irrelevant to whether it's right. You can look at all kinds of numbers which are not the stock market to determine how well people are doing and whether things are getting better or worse. Your conspiracy theories about unemployment numbers are wrong.
The job market is objectively terrible, groceries are insanely expensive and people can’t afford to buy homes until they’re 50. Your attempts at gaslighting aren’t going to work anymore buddy
This seems to be a problem limited to specific metros. On the whole, Gen Z is more likely than millennials to be a homeowner at their age. Millennials in turn were more likely than Gen-X to own a home when Boomers were at that age. The idea that living standards and financial milestones have gone down for more recent generations doesn't seem to bear out, this Economist piece digs into detail: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/04/16/g...
The piece doesn't seem to refute the key claims made by The Economist, namely that Gen-Z has higher inflation-adjusted incomes than previous generations. It's biggest criticism seems to be:
> The Economist piece and kindred articles are good examples of how to lie with statistics. You can show that the typical 25-year-old’s income outpaces boomers’ income when they were 25 only by failing to adjust for inflation and the rising costs of life’s necessities, or using averages rather than medians.
But the Economist did use inflation-adjusted median earnings in its analysis of incomes by age among different generations. The Economist cited the median after-tax income, adjusted for inflation. (https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=10...) I'm not sure why this author seems to think that the Economist is failing to adjust for inflation or not using medians, when it says so quite clearly in their graphs.
The Prospect article also says that home ownership among under-35s has gone down, and links to data on the home ownership rates grouped by age (https://www.prb.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/a-02132020-ar...) but the data ends in 2017. The oldest of Gen-Z would only be 20 years old at the time this data ends. When we look at the Economist's wrote:
> Bolstered by high incomes, American Zoomers’ home-ownership rates are higher than millennials’ at the same age (even if they are lower than previous generations’).
A chart of home ownership rates that end in 2017 could not possibly refute this claim given that Gen-Z would be too young to buy homes around the time that the data's source ends. The home ownership rate among under-35s increased from 34% in 2017 to 39% in 2023 (https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/07/younger-house...), so when Gen-Z started to enter their earliest feasible home-buying years the ownership rate was in a period of recovery. The Economist's claims seem to bear out.
The rest of the piece goes off on tangents largely unrelated to the financial outcomes related to Gen-Z relative to previous generations. For instance, it cites a pew survey on the percentage of young adults that support their parents. But it does not compare that against earlier decades, so there's no evidence in any change in rate over time. In fact the bulk of the piece shares data that aren't relevant. E.g. how does the racial breakdown of the subprime mortgages relate to incomes by age and birth year?
Of course people hate AI. In a world where people no longer believe that progress in technological efficiency will pass any benefits on to them why would they possibly like this product? What will AI do to improve your actual life besides be a search engine or generate shitty art? Sure it’ll revolutionize business but nobody actually thinks that means more food on the table for them. They think it means more billions in rich people’s bank accounts and less jobs. And meanwhile it’s become the basis for the entire economy and is driving up costs on power and water and electronics.
I actually completely disagree, and think that AI hate is just going to grow. My take is:
1. The public response resembles the stages of grief, and people are fluctuating between denial (AI isn't really that smart) and anger (AI is horrible).
2. Your perception of something tend to be shaped by the sum of your experiences with it, and a lot of the exposure to AI is via fake, scams, bots, and low efforts content (AI slop).
3. I think that the fear of losing your job and your life's stability is there, but it's not yet as common as it should be in the general public. I expect that to be the main driver of AI hate, and that will be a lot fiercer than the current hate, and could lead to a civil war or worse. Depending on AI progression.
4. There is also a lot of tribalism involved. We live in a polarized society, and many people adapt their opinions to the opinion of the group they identify with. That itself drives anger towards AI, as it is part of the greater cause.
I think it’s interesting that AI is in itself compressing the length of time it takes to move through its phases to reach maturity. It’s a lot faster than for example the dotcom phase. Humans don’t much like change, and fast change worries them even more. The dotcom bubble didn’t really threaten jobs in the same way that the AI shift is. It’s closer to the industrial revolution / the industrial loom where people lost their jobs in waves. It’s going to be interesting to see if we end up with another Luddite push back.
Sure, but sentiment is harder to compare. People can't just go burn down a data center so simply. I think if "AI" was just a machine in the field outside, people would be destroying it.
I agree partly with your comment, but I want to add this perspective:
The dot-com era treatened and killed many jobs in banking (bank tellers and such). AI is now doing the same, but now it is threatening the jobs of consultants.
It may not be as big as tech layoffs but my wife negotiated a relocation. We used a broker and a lawyer for the first time. We did consultation with a new set of brokers and lawyers. My wife felt they were not aggressive enough. She negotiated EVERYTHING with the landlord (a very large regional landlord). She got more than what she would get and everything was in her favor.
Not only did she gain $50k more in tenant improvement/free rent/et and other freebies that the brokers/lawers she did not get, but easily saved $10k to paying these "professionals".
I've personally used Codex to reconcile financial data, and met a guy who basically built his own AI inference engine to help him fight a custody battle for his daughter (semantic search over gigabytes of documents).
I'm not saying lawyers and accountants are going to all be out of a job (at the end of the day, they do more than just comb over documents to find the needle in the haystack), but a lot of the manual grunt work can be automated there too.
This. AI is augmenting normal work and eating engineering/security/research work alive. Eventually it will eat normal work. We'll be prompting no matter the role.
Gemini helped me a lot for my tax return. It actually did a better job than Deloitte, it found several mistakes in previous returns they filled for me.
I would say there's basically zero chance lawyers go out of a job. As soon as it looks like lawyers will be replaced by AI, the people who run the government (who are lawyers!) will pass laws to make it illegal to cut the human out of the loop.
This is likely to happen but would be disastrous. Our experience show that when you cannot afford a lawyer that using AI helps equal the battle field. You can self represent and use all the case history and laws that AI has searched for. We have been successful doing this in cases where we may have lost without the use of AI and gained some form of justice as a result. Even before AI became prevalent we found we got better results with researching manually than the free lawyers who did not care and seemed not to understand the law themselves. With AI the advantage is saving time. You can live your life without sending weeks working on it fully.
The only way they can make it illegal to take the human out of the loop is if they ban self representation. Otherwise people will do research with AI and just present their findings in court. But the free/cheap lawyers are actually so much worse.If laws prevent self representation we would increase the inequality even more.
There are licensing laws already protecting the lawyers whose names appear on motions and briefs, but not much protection for the junior lawyers who will be impacted most. Big law, like the fancy consultancies, was historically built like a pyramid, with an army of 1st-3rd year associates doing due diligence and document reviews. The bottom was cut out of that in the 2000s by offshoring and automation. AI is contributing to another wave, but not dropping off a cliff.
Artists for one are impacted by AI, teachers are impacted too combined with the whole education system and the job market is really weird in all industries not just tech because all of these factors combined with all others
One can argue that hard labour is the one which isn't impacted but even those dont pay enough to break your body completely over unless you own your business, and even then, to say that AI/Robotics companies are definitely going to or are already trying to position themselves here too.
My point is that a lot of industries feel unsafe right now because of AI, but its just that tech has the most direct impact.
Honestly, my opinion, our lives were fundamentally better before some tech came along - touchscren phones & “social” networks being the main two. We still haven’t caught up with the carnage this has caused. Kids social media bans are only now becoming a thing in some countries and we’re left with a deep sense of unease it’s really not to protect the kids at all.
It’s lead to plenty of good as well, a luddite I am not. I love my tech. I love conversing with people online, I became a happy mIRC user well over 20 years ago, I use telegram & discord daily. I just really, really despise tech’s current trajectory. I grew up wanting this stuff to supplement my life, not control & rule over it. The days where I want to toss it all in the trash and run off to the woods are increasing all the time. I didn’t want an internet where i’m constantly having to ask myself every image… is this real? I certainly don’t want one that’s constantly surveilling me and I definitely don’t want one that’s about to threaten to lock me out, or up(!), the moment I commit wrongspeak.
The analogy would be a 17 year old kid passing his driving test and getting straight in a 500bhp rear wheel drive sports car. We as a society have just collectively done that over the last two decades. And it feels like we’re just about to take it nuclear with AI.
So we can dwell on all of that past or set ourselves some basic goals and ambitions to aim for. Refocus. Change the conversation.
Somebody responded to me earlier that “at least we have reusable rockets”. Do you know what I really want? It’s really quite basic - clean air, clean water and clean energy. Let’s collectively work to tick those three off the list, for every.single.soul here on this planet first, then after that, we can focus on making them free for everybody. Then we can set our sights on the stars.
I have to bring this up every time someone brings up luddites. I'm a Luddite.
The Luddite movement was not "people scared of new technology". That's propaganda that's stuck around for far too long. Luddites were skilled craftspeople that saw businesses gleefully eliminating their jobs without any sort of plan or thought for what it'd do to their lives. They were weavers seeing industrial looms doing the job of 1000 weavers being managed by one child with 2 fewer fingers.
It's pretty directly analogous to AI. We see all the major property owners licking their lips at the notion that they can simply fire a huge portion of the workforce with no thought of "what will these people do now"? Most of them are happy for us to just go away and work for uber/doordash.
If AI reaches it's promises, we do not have the infrastructure to handle an economy where only a few wealthy owners rake in everything and the rest fight for pennies (which are sapped away from the current rent seeking economy).
Yes, you are totally correct and I really appreciate this type of comment. I used luddite just because of ease/laziness, but it was not correct at all in hindsight.
I totally agree with all your remarks btw. I think society having lots of skilled tradespeople is a major win for everyone. Yet we as a society seem to be doing everything we can to stifle and destroy a lot of skilled tradework. Much has already died over the last few decades and either will never return, or will take herculean levels of effort to get restarted.
Everytime I see something like this I wonder how much of a repeat it is of when the first steam powered monstrosity started to gain some public traction, or electricity, or...
Hate it or love it, something's inevitably coming. Literally no way to stop it when it's ultimately China vs US, which wasn't even a concern during previous technological revolutions.
The question is how to handle it and what do we do with society.
Right now, seems like we are heading directly towards "hoover towns" [1]. The US government has abandoned any notion of protecting or providing for the citizenry.
We got out of hooverville last time through massive government investment into the general public. A "new deal" where the government provided good paying jobs to the unemployed for the public good. Yet, slowly ever since the enactment of those protections, we've been seeing a slow whittling away of the notion of the government protecting the people. Instead, we've become a government that only protects profits.
Way I see it, there will ultimately be no profits to protect, as human labour will eventually have 0 economic value, triggering an end to the flow of capital and markets. Serious structural changes will be needed to deal with what comes next, the kind of thing I strongly suspect China is far more prepared for than the US (it's not must an economic shift, but a psychological one as well). Whether or not it comes down to "hoover towns" and all that entails depends deeply on how quickly the government begins sustainably adapting to the new reality that's unfolding.
> triggering an end to the flow of capital and markets.
Capital will still flow, it will just be between the people that already own things who are willing to trade. If the government doesn't take a more active role in the economy, then we are looking at one where every bit of capital is extracted from those that have little and where the majority of the flow of capital happens in between those that have it.
IE, those that can afford a yacht will be able to buy one from the yacht company whose owners can then turn around and buy private jets.
The average joe who wasn't in "yacht" society will be left to fend for themselves, ideally for the yacht owners, they'll just die because they are a "waste" on society.
Before that happens, I expect some of the average joes will be able to find work propping up the lavish lifestyle of the yacht owner. Polishing their yacht, making their food, etc.
Even then there still won't be capital per se, as that system is rooted in humans' economically valuable labour. There can always be bartering of course, but it'd be pretty meaningless as all the "owners" will be able to create their own X, where X is a jet, yacht, or anything else that one with the access to the means of production (AI+robots) desires.
As to those without access, they'll just die out; there will be no fending at all unless one is given or takes access.
Same happened in the dot-com boom. There was a bunch of folks who were in it because they were genuinely interested in building cool stuff. And then the money got interested, and suddenly there was a wave of scam artists and grifters. That receded (but never entirely went away) when the money bubble burst.
People really hate AI because it's marketed in the worst ways possible for the general public.
CEOs love to get up and say "Hey, we are firing 1000 people because of this awesome AI" [1]
For people that like computers, AI is jacking up the price of electronics with CEOs saying things like "We don't even have a place to plug these cards in, we are just buying up whatever we can get" [2]. They are further causing memory manufacturers to simply discontinue consumer products [3]
Then there are the AI CEOs that love advertising the fact that their companies will eliminate huge swaths of the job market and make good paying jobs obsolete. [4]
Of course when the general public even starts to ask "ok, what is this and why should I care" a lot of the answers are "You just should, you'll be left behind" without actual explanations for why or how. [5]
And of course lets not forget that practically cartoonish villiny of the data centers being ramrodded through by bribing local politicians with false claims of tax benefits. All while being powered by massive amounts of fossil fuel burners. [6]
Yeah, people hate AI, because it seems be a bunch of out of touch CEOs that only talk to each other in glee about how awesome it will be to have no workers and how great it is that they have enough money and political influence to do anything they like regardless public sentiment.
It's a product that wasn't sold to the average joe, it was sold to the uber wealthy. It very clearly shows.
That might be obvious, but when a significant number of people don't pay enough attention to know something is AI, or simply watch it anyway and then scroll onto the next clip, so it keeps them engaged rather than bouncing them off the platform, it's still doing it's job of retaining attention to push more ads.
Most people I know will claim to not like AI, but they happily continue to scroll their Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok feed that's full of it. Until they delete the app in protest and go read a book, little will change.
Are your tokens earning dollars and do they translate into a sustainable form of income? Honest question. I know people who have been laid off and their answer seems to be "use AI make stuff and go forward for the win". All the while actually paying these AI companies to train on their thoughts or slop or whatever it should be called now.
I think there is some mass confusion happening right now (psychosis even) and things are getting scary.
You bring up a point that I have been wrestling with in my mind.
> "use AI make stuff and go forward for the win".
If anyone with AI access can do this, then what real value can one produce? For example, if one makes a nice little FizzBuzz widget, then why pay for their widget when I can just make my own? Sure, there is a cost to buy/time to recreate analysis to be had, but it's easier to recreate software now more than ever.
Exactly. Now not only does fizzbuzz exist, but there are at least 10k variants of it with all the colours and flavours you can imagine. I honestly don't know what to make of this. We can literally ask a machine monkey to make something millions of times. Does the human touch now come from the approval process? Where is the humanity? Gosh I wish it were 2015 or before, again. Thanks Attention Is All You Need, you really helped.
I don't really see the problem here. We're all getting laid off because AI I superior to us. I can now do the job of a product owner or even exceed it by simply prompting with some nuance, magic spells and bit of salt and pepper.
But down the road the AI bros promise us that this will reduce inequality and make human society better, somehow.
I really need to understand this shit and if anyone can weigh in on it I'd be most grateful. We will all eventually get replaced by AI and yet we need to pay Big AI to stay in the game. Even when nobody has any income.
I'm sure that there is someone here who can smack down this comment and put me in my place and give me a good and proper lesson in economics.
I'm not so sure "ai" (LLMs) is superior to us. LLMs are actually incapable of being superior, maybe some years down the road some new tech makes my statement mute, but today is not that today.
Perhaps you software engineers are in a bubble - people I know from accountants, portfolio managers to mechanical engineers are barely using AI - they use it more to tell jokes.
Anti-AI propaganda is false-flag. AI is going to happen. The only question is whether it will benefit everyone or just the rich. Best way for the rich to ensure they own it is to convince the poors that AI is a monster, so they don’t demand it for themselves, and instead fight pointless battles they are guaranteed to lose. Folks need to wake up and start talking about a post-scarcity world where machines do all the work. You can have Star Trek or Elysium.
If you can make the poors fight for 2 instead of 1, then you guarantee that you don't get 1. If instead, the poors fight for 1, they've got a chance of getting it. You present AI as a false dichotomy: no AI or AI for billionaires.
Any of us arguing for (1) get shouted down by the very people who would benefit most from it. The poors do the job of the billionaires.
AI is capital incarnate. People can finally put a name on an unease that's been growing inside them for a while now.
We see these subhuman billionaire ghouls invited on TV daily to fearmonger about AI finally replacing all labourers and freeing the Epstein class from relying on these pesky workers. We see them making millions in fake money with each announcements, while the rest of us have nothing to show for it. We see slop everywhere, permeating every facets of our lives, in the name of never-ending cost reductions.
It really doesn't matter what AI can or cannot do, what it even is. It is capital incarnate. The promise that labor was finally vanquished and the bourgeoisie is free from its shackles, at last. It is certainly sold as such, and people notice, even if unconsciously.
Every one of those students cheated with ai? That's bonkers.
Even if that were true though, it seems like they can still resent the massively changed job market and career prospects they are graduating into, right?
'Hate' and 'fascist' seem to reliably trigger people to stew in anger and give up their power.
Don't fall for the divide and conquer. You have agency, you can do your part to steer the ship if you can resist the learned helplessness of hatred.
AI is a tool. I enjoy using it as a search engine. But just like I don't trust everything on the internet, I don't blindly trust AI. AI's index the same information as search engines with additional retrieval error factored in.
There are deeply unprofitable modes of AI. The chat interfaces are, as I understand it, deeply unprofitable loss leaders whereas the enterprise API's and agentic stuff is profitable.
Maybe try to intensify your use of the unprofitable offerings if you you dislike what the AI companies stand for before the economics come back to earth for them?
This really keys in for me, expresses something super super important: figuring out what powers we do have and seizing them, finding positive constructive narratives & modes to get into and to share and tell of. Finding positive basis for interaction, for mastery, for the self to grow in: it's so obscured by the amassed consolidated pervading dark corporate consoldationism, that's subjugated us all under it's vast sprawling reporting chains.
There's a lot of rage against the web too. Not quite as strong, but the image of what the higher concentrated capital does with it, how it uses this platform that's available everywhere, that's super powerful... I hope people can somehow see past their rages and frustrations and think and ask after themselves and their friends, their communities.
Aside from them though, the stories of webshacks of the past, individual practitioners out there, pre the Pax Reactus, figuring stuff out: that tale of a smaller scale industry was beautiful. And I don't know what a new claim to power, what staking in today looks like. How to we see ourselves as deciders, project ourselves as making meaningful decisions & steering? How do we show that, and what can make it looks like a success?
I think developers have these amazing connections with the work and hope for what connecting can be, what the internet means, and are so inspired by having help with the labor of building. But these stories these feelings: they are gonna be crushed. It's not a tale that's easy to tell. Those "Close to the Machine" (Ullman) live a weird life if having these deep connections & intimacy with systems, that are so sweepingly powerful, but man, it is such an alien world to most, and trying to tell these stories, trying to share this wonder: it's hard.
I worry so much that the beauty & wonder here won't figure out how it can stand. I think of the Rose in Dark Tower, showing up across time & form, in ways, signalling so strongly to some few in the world who recognize it, but the world mostly moving around it, unheeding.
> I think developers have these amazing connections with the work and hope for what connecting can be, what the internet means, and are so inspired by having help with the labor of building.
Yes, this is it, you understand! The little spark of creation that we all can wield is so clear in software development.
> But these stories these feelings: they are gonna be crushed. It's not a tale that's easy to tell.
Noooo! This is the narrative. The matrix has you. Don't believe the hype. The problem of existence is choice, and it's a continuous problem.
The top down narrative control is so so powerful now. Your mention of anger at the web is all one and the same. I am seriously yearning for the Lightphone[1] just to disconnect from the web and messaging apps when I'm away from my desk.
It's not AI. Like the layoffs AI is a convenient scapegoat for the economy creaking to a halt, real world income across most sectors won't buy a house in the state where the job is. It's hate, but it's only "against AI" because AI is being trotted out why people can't get their first home until they are 50 if they are lucky..
I remember reading about superstitious behavior in pigeons.
You feed pigeons randomly, and if they happened to be standing on one foot when they got fed, they will associate that behavior with what happened. So they will stand on one foot while feeding.
In the same way, they economy goes bad, they might blame what they read about the government, or AI, or standing on one foot.
I think that the creepiness of the tech CEOs that show up in media has a ton to do with this too, as they seem like cartoonish villians.
Alex Karp, in particular, has some of the most absolutely horrifying clips of his TV appearances circulating all over video social media. But Musk has broader reach, and is even more oblivious and has tied himself to someone who he himself accused of pedophilia.
Andreesen, Thiel, Sam Altman, and the above are great at raising valuations for investors but they are doing it incredibly stupidly in a way that leads to massive backlash. California is voting for a billionaire tax this year, and I think that these tech CEOs only have themselves to blame for the backlash they are causing.
It might not be your intention, but your comment seems to imply that the problem here is more image than substance.
The problem isn't that these people are simply inarticulate and incapable of expressing their views in ways that appeal to people. It's that their views are unappealing (if not downright objectionable) to most people.
Right on.
It's a sign of how disempowered the populace is that these selfish ghouls don't even feel the need to pretend to be decent functioning adults anymore. Because, why bother? What is anyone gonna do about it?
I agree fully with your second paragraph. But regardless of what the core ideas are, they way they have been presented has been abominable, and the politics is judged on the presentation, because the US media largely presents these words unfiltered and without context and completely along the lines of the message that the US tech CEOs want to present.
It's both. A view people do not like, but are unaware of, is one they are not mad about.
I think you are both right. It is true that people only hate these people because of their actual views, but also it doesn't help that they made themselves celebrities and go on social media for attention.
I bet you there are people equally repulsive and influential but face little public backlash because they never show up in front of a camera.
As I understand it, the last sentence stems from the fact that too large of a share of the total wealth is in the hands of those that don't benefit from more homes. AI is what's prioritised by them and what will lead to even smaller flow from the efficient wealth aggregators to those needing homes, once most of the simpler office work becomes obsolete, because, let's be real, average person's reasoning, work-pay efficiency, obedience and meticulousness shouldn't be too hard to surpass with AI in a few years. AI also makes it easier to prevent a change in status quo, while being harmful to the environment and decreasing the share of current-level-of-above-average-quality-user-oriented output.
So yeah, money becoming less of a proxy of "how much someone contributed to society" and more "how much someone contributed to the oligarchs' goals", while those goals are for AI and for peoples' detriment, makes the situation actually about AI.
The technology that helps extract wealth improves, while most of the purely consumer-oriented products are becoming a con and a scam, especially if US companies are involved. The Mirabell's "original" recipe turned the best treat in the world into a generic candy, all are just palm oil + sugar + shrinkflation. There is also non-repairable tech with non-standard components, non-removable batteries, meat gets filled with water, washing machines die right after warranty ends, every digital service is trying to steal data instead of taking only the necessary or at least being transparent about what's taken and why, entertainment like Reddit and streaming services also get worse... AI slop is just another example, but a bit more visible and with a bit more side-effects.
> AI also makes it easier to prevent a change in status quo
This seems like the polar opposite of what the "AI safety" people are worried about and it seems unlikely that they could both be true at once.
> As I understand it, the last sentence stems from the fact that too large of a share of the total wealth is in the hands of those that don't benefit from more homes. AI is what's prioritised by them and what will lead to even smaller flow from the efficient wealth aggregators to those needing homes
These are both two independent things and two independent sets of people.
The main group of people opposing housing construction is landlords and existing homeowners. The ones doing AI have almost no overlap with that. Moreover, "you get paid less" and "housing costs more due to artificial scarcity" are only tied together in the sense that money going to landlords and banks isn't going to workers, which again isn't the AI thing.
Or to put it a different way, you could mitigate a lot of the "AI problems" by building more housing and the AI people would be pretty fine with that.
I have to wonder sometimes if the people of the US will ever realize that their housing shortages are self-inflicted. It seems like a massive number of people have somehow been hypnotized into thinking that building more homes increases home prices.
Its not self inflicted. It does have many causes, zoning being one of them, but the reluctance to build a they do in eg China is a problem
By coincidence the United States isn’t the only country Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have the same problem lack of affordability for people between 18 and 35 who can’t afford to buy a house/home.
Notice that all these countries are English speaking countries? Aside from speaking English they also have lots in common when it comes to the way the economy and society is run. I can only speak for the United States, but I’ve noticed unfordable not luxury apartments going up everywhere and starter homes are not.
> Notice that all these countries are English speaking countries?
It looks more like you only read English-language news which is concerned about the happenings in English-speaking countries.
https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_count...
These are current average houseprice-to-income ratios per country. The first English-speaking country on that list is in 87th rank.
The price to income ratio is influenced more by income than housing prices, because housing prices have a floor in terms of construction materials costs, and then countries in deep poverty are going to have a grisly ratio. For example, Cuba has some of the lowest housing costs in the world, but it's #4 on the list for worst price to income ratio. Nigeria is at #1 because their median income is $825/year rather than because they inhibit housing construction.
The issue is, why does it cost several times as much to add a housing unit in the US as it does in Mexico? That can't be explained by the cost of lumber or copper since they're tradable commodities and if it was labor then prefabricated components should be driving down the price unless it's some kind of a racket. Which implies that it's mainly rackets and zoning restrictions.
The "average" is "median", correct?
I suppose the message is that although housing (and health care and higher education) costs in the US (and elsewhere) have outpaced wage growth for the last half century or so, it could still be worse living in a country with much lower wages to begin with.
Reluctance to build makes it a self inflicted problem, no?
It is absolutely self-inflicted. Most major US cities made the choice to massively limit dense housing construction through zoning and permitting in the 70s-80s, and then shifted into complete amnesia mode and/or active denialism about why population numbers were suddenly growing much faster than housing construction rates.
Right. It's not AI. It's the corporations behavior in relation to AI. But most people have no experience or interaction with AI outside of corporate services or AI features in things that shouldn't have AI or make it worse (like phone support). So in their lived experience all AI sucks and you can't blame 'em for that perception.
But the real villains here are the same as ever, the most dangerous non-human persons: corporate persons.
People also hard slop images
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Fortunately the complaints about the economy and homeownership are also just folk wisdom that doesn't really reflect reality https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/05/how-gen-z-outpaces-past-gene...
The economy, real wages, etc are basically higher than ever (despite idiot Trump's best efforts).
People are mad because being mad is fun and we're all on being mad machines 24/7.
This has nothing to do with reality, where reality means "what people have", rather than "the economy".
"What people have" is robustly measured, well-understood, and pretty much all available evidence suggests that people (at least in the US and developed countries) are doing better than ever on most important metrics. But it is not as seductive as "everything is terrible"!
> doing better than ever on most important metrics
I'd say the most important metrics are those that matter to people, not those that other people say should matter to them. Births are going down, suicide is going up, but they're just drama queens, we ran the numbers... that is what turns mere criticism into hatred.
Less and less people own a bigger and bigger share of wealth, and they're too often not decent people who respect democracy and the fact that they're still just one person, not a particularly special one, and still only have one vote. No, many of them are not content with that, and have assaulted the people ever since they successfully fought for the few worker's rights they have now. That is bad enough, and not even close to the full picture. That "it used to be worse" in some metrics isn't relevant, what matters is now, how it is because of robber barons, and how it would be without them.
If someone steals most of your shit but leave you with more than "people used to have, on average, in historic times", you wouldn't be placated by that. Because, weirdly enough, you don't view yourself as a mere abstraction to be talked about that way, and billions of other people don't view themselves that way either.
Look, don’t know what to tell you, there is lots of extremely reliable well vetted and well understood information about the welfare of people on this planet and in what directions it is moving. Pretending information is imaginary or offensively abstract because you’re upset about income inequality (which is even more of an abstraction) is not good or helpful.
Home ownership being one of them? What about % of people turning to sex work (either in person or online) for income?
This information is just... available to you. Yes, homeownership being one of them - improving.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
Yes, "sex in exchange for money or drugs" - improving.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr046.pdf
Sorry to sound harsh, but you are out of touch. Many social metrics are very complex objectively and are not accounted for by "robust measuring", and this is the biggest example there ever was. Data is king where it can describe reality - but the elephant in the room is that data can't describe reality in some very high-profile societal contexts, and pretending it can is dangerous with a capital D.
What are you relying on if not information about reality?
You are out of touch with reality
You will never break through the thousands of hours of doomer bullshit people are fed on TikTok all day. The post you first responded to, for instance, is talking about not being able to afford a home in the entire state they work in, which is obviously ridiculous, but it feeds the same "woe is me" bullshit from people whose only outlet for existential angst is now bitching about how poor they think they'll be in five years when they turn 18.
Some people are regurgitating social media. Most people are expressing the actual reality they are experiencing first- or second-hand.
Give a shit.
Basically all the data we have about people’s actual reality (including and especially what they say they are experiencing first hand) does not match the dire descriptions of the people I’m replying to.
Who are you going to believe? Your lying bank balance or statistics?
Where are you getting your numbers from because the stock market has ceased to be linked to reality for the last decade. Trump fired the stats and numbers office. The only numbers we have are "trust me" numbers which are completely false. Most people would agree that the economy has ground to a halt and everyone I know complains about the gas prices and grocery prices. The reality is there are a lot of people out of work that aren't factored into unemployment numbers because we can't accurately calculate unemployment numbers anymore.
Whether most people agree is irrelevant to whether it's right. You can look at all kinds of numbers which are not the stock market to determine how well people are doing and whether things are getting better or worse. Your conspiracy theories about unemployment numbers are wrong.
The job market is objectively terrible, groceries are insanely expensive and people can’t afford to buy homes until they’re 50. Your attempts at gaslighting aren’t going to work anymore buddy
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Don't speak to people like this.
This seems to be a problem limited to specific metros. On the whole, Gen Z is more likely than millennials to be a homeowner at their age. Millennials in turn were more likely than Gen-X to own a home when Boomers were at that age. The idea that living standards and financial milestones have gone down for more recent generations doesn't seem to bear out, this Economist piece digs into detail: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/04/16/g...
Hopefully non-logged in users can at lease see the income-by-age graph: https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=480,quality=10...
I thought that was nicely rebutted years ago..
https://prospect.org/2024/05/14/2024-05-14-trendy-nonsense-g...
The piece doesn't seem to refute the key claims made by The Economist, namely that Gen-Z has higher inflation-adjusted incomes than previous generations. It's biggest criticism seems to be:
> The Economist piece and kindred articles are good examples of how to lie with statistics. You can show that the typical 25-year-old’s income outpaces boomers’ income when they were 25 only by failing to adjust for inflation and the rising costs of life’s necessities, or using averages rather than medians.
But the Economist did use inflation-adjusted median earnings in its analysis of incomes by age among different generations. The Economist cited the median after-tax income, adjusted for inflation. (https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=10...) I'm not sure why this author seems to think that the Economist is failing to adjust for inflation or not using medians, when it says so quite clearly in their graphs.
The Prospect article also says that home ownership among under-35s has gone down, and links to data on the home ownership rates grouped by age (https://www.prb.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/a-02132020-ar...) but the data ends in 2017. The oldest of Gen-Z would only be 20 years old at the time this data ends. When we look at the Economist's wrote:
> Bolstered by high incomes, American Zoomers’ home-ownership rates are higher than millennials’ at the same age (even if they are lower than previous generations’).
A chart of home ownership rates that end in 2017 could not possibly refute this claim given that Gen-Z would be too young to buy homes around the time that the data's source ends. The home ownership rate among under-35s increased from 34% in 2017 to 39% in 2023 (https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/07/younger-house...), so when Gen-Z started to enter their earliest feasible home-buying years the ownership rate was in a period of recovery. The Economist's claims seem to bear out.
The rest of the piece goes off on tangents largely unrelated to the financial outcomes related to Gen-Z relative to previous generations. For instance, it cites a pew survey on the percentage of young adults that support their parents. But it does not compare that against earlier decades, so there's no evidence in any change in rate over time. In fact the bulk of the piece shares data that aren't relevant. E.g. how does the racial breakdown of the subprime mortgages relate to incomes by age and birth year?
Of course people hate AI. In a world where people no longer believe that progress in technological efficiency will pass any benefits on to them why would they possibly like this product? What will AI do to improve your actual life besides be a search engine or generate shitty art? Sure it’ll revolutionize business but nobody actually thinks that means more food on the table for them. They think it means more billions in rich people’s bank accounts and less jobs. And meanwhile it’s become the basis for the entire economy and is driving up costs on power and water and electronics.
In our new era of corpo-facism the people will learn to love it or else.
Nothing a couple years of brain washing bots and algorithmic feeds cant fix.
I actually completely disagree, and think that AI hate is just going to grow. My take is:
1. The public response resembles the stages of grief, and people are fluctuating between denial (AI isn't really that smart) and anger (AI is horrible).
2. Your perception of something tend to be shaped by the sum of your experiences with it, and a lot of the exposure to AI is via fake, scams, bots, and low efforts content (AI slop).
3. I think that the fear of losing your job and your life's stability is there, but it's not yet as common as it should be in the general public. I expect that to be the main driver of AI hate, and that will be a lot fiercer than the current hate, and could lead to a civil war or worse. Depending on AI progression.
4. There is also a lot of tribalism involved. We live in a polarized society, and many people adapt their opinions to the opinion of the group they identify with. That itself drives anger towards AI, as it is part of the greater cause.
You win the mental acrobatics prize.
I think it’s interesting that AI is in itself compressing the length of time it takes to move through its phases to reach maturity. It’s a lot faster than for example the dotcom phase. Humans don’t much like change, and fast change worries them even more. The dotcom bubble didn’t really threaten jobs in the same way that the AI shift is. It’s closer to the industrial revolution / the industrial loom where people lost their jobs in waves. It’s going to be interesting to see if we end up with another Luddite push back.
Luddite would imply people are burning data centers down to fight back. I don't think we're quite there yet.
Sure, but sentiment is harder to compare. People can't just go burn down a data center so simply. I think if "AI" was just a machine in the field outside, people would be destroying it.
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I can't wait for it personally. I'm expecting the backlash against tech to be massive and terrible. It will be well deserved
I agree partly with your comment, but I want to add this perspective:
The dot-com era treatened and killed many jobs in banking (bank tellers and such). AI is now doing the same, but now it is threatening the jobs of consultants.
This. The internet killed high-street retail.
The tech industry is just eating itself. Other fields seem nowhere near as impacted.
It may not be as big as tech layoffs but my wife negotiated a relocation. We used a broker and a lawyer for the first time. We did consultation with a new set of brokers and lawyers. My wife felt they were not aggressive enough. She negotiated EVERYTHING with the landlord (a very large regional landlord). She got more than what she would get and everything was in her favor.
Not only did she gain $50k more in tenant improvement/free rent/et and other freebies that the brokers/lawers she did not get, but easily saved $10k to paying these "professionals".
I've personally used Codex to reconcile financial data, and met a guy who basically built his own AI inference engine to help him fight a custody battle for his daughter (semantic search over gigabytes of documents).
I'm not saying lawyers and accountants are going to all be out of a job (at the end of the day, they do more than just comb over documents to find the needle in the haystack), but a lot of the manual grunt work can be automated there too.
This. AI is augmenting normal work and eating engineering/security/research work alive. Eventually it will eat normal work. We'll be prompting no matter the role.
Gemini helped me a lot for my tax return. It actually did a better job than Deloitte, it found several mistakes in previous returns they filled for me.
I would say there's basically zero chance lawyers go out of a job. As soon as it looks like lawyers will be replaced by AI, the people who run the government (who are lawyers!) will pass laws to make it illegal to cut the human out of the loop.
This is likely to happen but would be disastrous. Our experience show that when you cannot afford a lawyer that using AI helps equal the battle field. You can self represent and use all the case history and laws that AI has searched for. We have been successful doing this in cases where we may have lost without the use of AI and gained some form of justice as a result. Even before AI became prevalent we found we got better results with researching manually than the free lawyers who did not care and seemed not to understand the law themselves. With AI the advantage is saving time. You can live your life without sending weeks working on it fully.
The only way they can make it illegal to take the human out of the loop is if they ban self representation. Otherwise people will do research with AI and just present their findings in court. But the free/cheap lawyers are actually so much worse.If laws prevent self representation we would increase the inequality even more.
There are licensing laws already protecting the lawyers whose names appear on motions and briefs, but not much protection for the junior lawyers who will be impacted most. Big law, like the fancy consultancies, was historically built like a pyramid, with an army of 1st-3rd year associates doing due diligence and document reviews. The bottom was cut out of that in the 2000s by offshoring and automation. AI is contributing to another wave, but not dropping off a cliff.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPLEGA
Artists for one are impacted by AI, teachers are impacted too combined with the whole education system and the job market is really weird in all industries not just tech because all of these factors combined with all others
One can argue that hard labour is the one which isn't impacted but even those dont pay enough to break your body completely over unless you own your business, and even then, to say that AI/Robotics companies are definitely going to or are already trying to position themselves here too.
My point is that a lot of industries feel unsafe right now because of AI, but its just that tech has the most direct impact.
https://archive.md/sgGST
Alternative to archive.md
https://web.archive.org/web/20260517221805if_/https://www.ax...
Honestly, my opinion, our lives were fundamentally better before some tech came along - touchscren phones & “social” networks being the main two. We still haven’t caught up with the carnage this has caused. Kids social media bans are only now becoming a thing in some countries and we’re left with a deep sense of unease it’s really not to protect the kids at all.
It’s lead to plenty of good as well, a luddite I am not. I love my tech. I love conversing with people online, I became a happy mIRC user well over 20 years ago, I use telegram & discord daily. I just really, really despise tech’s current trajectory. I grew up wanting this stuff to supplement my life, not control & rule over it. The days where I want to toss it all in the trash and run off to the woods are increasing all the time. I didn’t want an internet where i’m constantly having to ask myself every image… is this real? I certainly don’t want one that’s constantly surveilling me and I definitely don’t want one that’s about to threaten to lock me out, or up(!), the moment I commit wrongspeak.
The analogy would be a 17 year old kid passing his driving test and getting straight in a 500bhp rear wheel drive sports car. We as a society have just collectively done that over the last two decades. And it feels like we’re just about to take it nuclear with AI.
So we can dwell on all of that past or set ourselves some basic goals and ambitions to aim for. Refocus. Change the conversation.
Somebody responded to me earlier that “at least we have reusable rockets”. Do you know what I really want? It’s really quite basic - clean air, clean water and clean energy. Let’s collectively work to tick those three off the list, for every.single.soul here on this planet first, then after that, we can focus on making them free for everybody. Then we can set our sights on the stars.
> a luddite I am not
I have to bring this up every time someone brings up luddites. I'm a Luddite.
The Luddite movement was not "people scared of new technology". That's propaganda that's stuck around for far too long. Luddites were skilled craftspeople that saw businesses gleefully eliminating their jobs without any sort of plan or thought for what it'd do to their lives. They were weavers seeing industrial looms doing the job of 1000 weavers being managed by one child with 2 fewer fingers.
It's pretty directly analogous to AI. We see all the major property owners licking their lips at the notion that they can simply fire a huge portion of the workforce with no thought of "what will these people do now"? Most of them are happy for us to just go away and work for uber/doordash.
If AI reaches it's promises, we do not have the infrastructure to handle an economy where only a few wealthy owners rake in everything and the rest fight for pennies (which are sapped away from the current rent seeking economy).
Yes, you are totally correct and I really appreciate this type of comment. I used luddite just because of ease/laziness, but it was not correct at all in hindsight.
I totally agree with all your remarks btw. I think society having lots of skilled tradespeople is a major win for everyone. Yet we as a society seem to be doing everything we can to stifle and destroy a lot of skilled tradework. Much has already died over the last few decades and either will never return, or will take herculean levels of effort to get restarted.
An AI hate wave is here, yet when I opened the link:
> Axios AI+: Catch up on what's new and why it matters in just 5 minutes.
> Sign up for Axios AI+ to continue reading for free.
Axios = Company
Madison Mills = reporter (no control over Axios)
AI wave timeline:
Investors throw money at AI and companies using AI
Company X sees investors throwing $$$ and starts dancing too
Axios (monkey see monkey do)
Future:
Investors stop throwing money then dancing stop.
Everytime I see something like this I wonder how much of a repeat it is of when the first steam powered monstrosity started to gain some public traction, or electricity, or...
Hate it or love it, something's inevitably coming. Literally no way to stop it when it's ultimately China vs US, which wasn't even a concern during previous technological revolutions.
The question is how to handle it and what do we do with society.
Right now, seems like we are heading directly towards "hoover towns" [1]. The US government has abandoned any notion of protecting or providing for the citizenry.
We got out of hooverville last time through massive government investment into the general public. A "new deal" where the government provided good paying jobs to the unemployed for the public good. Yet, slowly ever since the enactment of those protections, we've been seeing a slow whittling away of the notion of the government protecting the people. Instead, we've become a government that only protects profits.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooverville
Way I see it, there will ultimately be no profits to protect, as human labour will eventually have 0 economic value, triggering an end to the flow of capital and markets. Serious structural changes will be needed to deal with what comes next, the kind of thing I strongly suspect China is far more prepared for than the US (it's not must an economic shift, but a psychological one as well). Whether or not it comes down to "hoover towns" and all that entails depends deeply on how quickly the government begins sustainably adapting to the new reality that's unfolding.
> triggering an end to the flow of capital and markets.
Capital will still flow, it will just be between the people that already own things who are willing to trade. If the government doesn't take a more active role in the economy, then we are looking at one where every bit of capital is extracted from those that have little and where the majority of the flow of capital happens in between those that have it.
IE, those that can afford a yacht will be able to buy one from the yacht company whose owners can then turn around and buy private jets.
The average joe who wasn't in "yacht" society will be left to fend for themselves, ideally for the yacht owners, they'll just die because they are a "waste" on society.
Before that happens, I expect some of the average joes will be able to find work propping up the lavish lifestyle of the yacht owner. Polishing their yacht, making their food, etc.
> between the people that already own things
Even then there still won't be capital per se, as that system is rooted in humans' economically valuable labour. There can always be bartering of course, but it'd be pretty meaningless as all the "owners" will be able to create their own X, where X is a jet, yacht, or anything else that one with the access to the means of production (AI+robots) desires.
As to those without access, they'll just die out; there will be no fending at all unless one is given or takes access.
The hate is not about the tech.
It's about the greed, lies, fascism, and basically that AI is making almost everything it touches worse.
It was here for quite a while - see Copilot, Recall, Microslop; pizza glue, bard, firefly, ...
Shoving shitty products down customers throat was a bad idea from the start. And now there are even more reasons to hate it
I know I can read this through archive.ph (like Bloomberg and Verge) but I’m just not gonna
I used to be proud to say I worked in tech. Now I look around me and I'm surrounded by scam artists and grifters. Where did it all go wrong?
It's always been this way, the branding changed.
Same happened in the dot-com boom. There was a bunch of folks who were in it because they were genuinely interested in building cool stuff. And then the money got interested, and suddenly there was a wave of scam artists and grifters. That receded (but never entirely went away) when the money bubble burst.
Same. I was convinced software was beautiful by previous generations - and as far as I can tell, it was.
It's been on the downhill for a while even before the AI wasn't it?
When people started making serious money it attracted all the bros and psychopaths from the finance industry
People really hate AI because it's marketed in the worst ways possible for the general public.
CEOs love to get up and say "Hey, we are firing 1000 people because of this awesome AI" [1]
For people that like computers, AI is jacking up the price of electronics with CEOs saying things like "We don't even have a place to plug these cards in, we are just buying up whatever we can get" [2]. They are further causing memory manufacturers to simply discontinue consumer products [3]
Then there are the AI CEOs that love advertising the fact that their companies will eliminate huge swaths of the job market and make good paying jobs obsolete. [4]
Of course when the general public even starts to ask "ok, what is this and why should I care" a lot of the answers are "You just should, you'll be left behind" without actual explanations for why or how. [5]
And of course lets not forget that practically cartoonish villiny of the data centers being ramrodded through by bribing local politicians with false claims of tax benefits. All while being powered by massive amounts of fossil fuel burners. [6]
Yeah, people hate AI, because it seems be a bunch of out of touch CEOs that only talk to each other in glee about how awesome it will be to have no workers and how great it is that they have enough money and political influence to do anything they like regardless public sentiment.
It's a product that wasn't sold to the average joe, it was sold to the uber wealthy. It very clearly shows.
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
[3] https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
[4] https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-s...
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hTJUl4--8c
[6] https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/05/04/utah-data-center-fina...
To put it simply, nobody wants to watch AI slop. This should be obvious!
That might be obvious, but when a significant number of people don't pay enough attention to know something is AI, or simply watch it anyway and then scroll onto the next clip, so it keeps them engaged rather than bouncing them off the platform, it's still doing it's job of retaining attention to push more ads.
Most people I know will claim to not like AI, but they happily continue to scroll their Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok feed that's full of it. Until they delete the app in protest and go read a book, little will change.
I hate it, yet I'm burning millions of tokens doing shit I previously knew I could do, never had the attention or time to, but now, its like crack...
Are your tokens earning dollars and do they translate into a sustainable form of income? Honest question. I know people who have been laid off and their answer seems to be "use AI make stuff and go forward for the win". All the while actually paying these AI companies to train on their thoughts or slop or whatever it should be called now.
I think there is some mass confusion happening right now (psychosis even) and things are getting scary.
You bring up a point that I have been wrestling with in my mind.
> "use AI make stuff and go forward for the win".
If anyone with AI access can do this, then what real value can one produce? For example, if one makes a nice little FizzBuzz widget, then why pay for their widget when I can just make my own? Sure, there is a cost to buy/time to recreate analysis to be had, but it's easier to recreate software now more than ever.
Exactly. Now not only does fizzbuzz exist, but there are at least 10k variants of it with all the colours and flavours you can imagine. I honestly don't know what to make of this. We can literally ask a machine monkey to make something millions of times. Does the human touch now come from the approval process? Where is the humanity? Gosh I wish it were 2015 or before, again. Thanks Attention Is All You Need, you really helped.
I don't really see the problem here. We're all getting laid off because AI I superior to us. I can now do the job of a product owner or even exceed it by simply prompting with some nuance, magic spells and bit of salt and pepper.
But down the road the AI bros promise us that this will reduce inequality and make human society better, somehow.
I really need to understand this shit and if anyone can weigh in on it I'd be most grateful. We will all eventually get replaced by AI and yet we need to pay Big AI to stay in the game. Even when nobody has any income.
I'm sure that there is someone here who can smack down this comment and put me in my place and give me a good and proper lesson in economics.
I'm not so sure "ai" (LLMs) is superior to us. LLMs are actually incapable of being superior, maybe some years down the road some new tech makes my statement mute, but today is not that today.
moot*
Lmao what on earth is this crap.
Perhaps you software engineers are in a bubble - people I know from accountants, portfolio managers to mechanical engineers are barely using AI - they use it more to tell jokes.
> AI bros promise us that this will reduce inequality and make human society better, somehow
It is going to make human society better. And it already is doing it.
The problem is neither you nor me are a part of the society. The AI bros are.
I love this comment. Yeah. "their" society is succeeding and we're in a fish tank. It's really like that.
Thank you.
It's a big club and you ain't in it. (C)
Anti-AI propaganda is false-flag. AI is going to happen. The only question is whether it will benefit everyone or just the rich. Best way for the rich to ensure they own it is to convince the poors that AI is a monster, so they don’t demand it for themselves, and instead fight pointless battles they are guaranteed to lose. Folks need to wake up and start talking about a post-scarcity world where machines do all the work. You can have Star Trek or Elysium.
> Anti-AI propaganda is false-flag.
Why would AI providers benefit from anti-AI propaganda?
There are three options:
1. AI owned by everyone
2. No AI
3. AI owned by billionaires
If you can make the poors fight for 2 instead of 1, then you guarantee that you don't get 1. If instead, the poors fight for 1, they've got a chance of getting it. You present AI as a false dichotomy: no AI or AI for billionaires.
Any of us arguing for (1) get shouted down by the very people who would benefit most from it. The poors do the job of the billionaires.
> The only question is whether it will benefit everyone or just the rich
Are you seriously mulling that as a question?
AI is capital incarnate. People can finally put a name on an unease that's been growing inside them for a while now.
We see these subhuman billionaire ghouls invited on TV daily to fearmonger about AI finally replacing all labourers and freeing the Epstein class from relying on these pesky workers. We see them making millions in fake money with each announcements, while the rest of us have nothing to show for it. We see slop everywhere, permeating every facets of our lives, in the name of never-ending cost reductions.
It really doesn't matter what AI can or cannot do, what it even is. It is capital incarnate. The promise that labor was finally vanquished and the bourgeoisie is free from its shackles, at last. It is certainly sold as such, and people notice, even if unconsciously.
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This is literally just "yet you participate in society, curious!" type commentary.
Every one of those students cheated with ai? That's bonkers.
Even if that were true though, it seems like they can still resent the massively changed job market and career prospects they are graduating into, right?
'Hate' and 'fascist' seem to reliably trigger people to stew in anger and give up their power.
Don't fall for the divide and conquer. You have agency, you can do your part to steer the ship if you can resist the learned helplessness of hatred.
AI is a tool. I enjoy using it as a search engine. But just like I don't trust everything on the internet, I don't blindly trust AI. AI's index the same information as search engines with additional retrieval error factored in.
There are deeply unprofitable modes of AI. The chat interfaces are, as I understand it, deeply unprofitable loss leaders whereas the enterprise API's and agentic stuff is profitable.
Maybe try to intensify your use of the unprofitable offerings if you you dislike what the AI companies stand for before the economics come back to earth for them?
This really keys in for me, expresses something super super important: figuring out what powers we do have and seizing them, finding positive constructive narratives & modes to get into and to share and tell of. Finding positive basis for interaction, for mastery, for the self to grow in: it's so obscured by the amassed consolidated pervading dark corporate consoldationism, that's subjugated us all under it's vast sprawling reporting chains.
There's a lot of rage against the web too. Not quite as strong, but the image of what the higher concentrated capital does with it, how it uses this platform that's available everywhere, that's super powerful... I hope people can somehow see past their rages and frustrations and think and ask after themselves and their friends, their communities.
Aside from them though, the stories of webshacks of the past, individual practitioners out there, pre the Pax Reactus, figuring stuff out: that tale of a smaller scale industry was beautiful. And I don't know what a new claim to power, what staking in today looks like. How to we see ourselves as deciders, project ourselves as making meaningful decisions & steering? How do we show that, and what can make it looks like a success?
I think developers have these amazing connections with the work and hope for what connecting can be, what the internet means, and are so inspired by having help with the labor of building. But these stories these feelings: they are gonna be crushed. It's not a tale that's easy to tell. Those "Close to the Machine" (Ullman) live a weird life if having these deep connections & intimacy with systems, that are so sweepingly powerful, but man, it is such an alien world to most, and trying to tell these stories, trying to share this wonder: it's hard.
I worry so much that the beauty & wonder here won't figure out how it can stand. I think of the Rose in Dark Tower, showing up across time & form, in ways, signalling so strongly to some few in the world who recognize it, but the world mostly moving around it, unheeding.
> I think developers have these amazing connections with the work and hope for what connecting can be, what the internet means, and are so inspired by having help with the labor of building.
Yes, this is it, you understand! The little spark of creation that we all can wield is so clear in software development.
> But these stories these feelings: they are gonna be crushed. It's not a tale that's easy to tell.
Noooo! This is the narrative. The matrix has you. Don't believe the hype. The problem of existence is choice, and it's a continuous problem.
The top down narrative control is so so powerful now. Your mention of anger at the web is all one and the same. I am seriously yearning for the Lightphone[1] just to disconnect from the web and messaging apps when I'm away from my desk.
[1] https://www.thelightphone.com/lightiii