Comment by antegamisou
3 days ago
I agree with you but there's nothing astonishing about any of this unfortunately, it was bound to happen. Almost all of cautionary statements about AI abuse fall on deaf ears of HN's overenthusiastic and ill-informed rabble, stultified by YC tech lobbyists.
Worst part about it was all the people fretting on about ridiculous threats like the chatbot turning into skynet sucked the oxygen out of the room for the more realistic corporate threats
Right. But then the AI firms did that deliberately, didn't they? Started the big philosophical argument to move the focus away from the things they were doing (epic misappropriation of intellectual property) and the very things their customers intended to do: fire huge numbers of staff on an international, multi-industry scale, replace them with AI, and replace already limited human accountability with simple disclaimers.
The biggest worry would always be that the tools would be stultifying and shit but executives would use them to drive layoffs on an epic scale anyway.
And hey now here we are: the tools are stultifying and shit, the projects have largely failed, and the only way to fix the losses is: layoffs.
It's fun that the working class bears the brunt of the mistakes of management.
Manager: hey let's go all in on this fancy new toy! We'll all be billionaires!
Employee: oh yeah I will work nights and weekends with no pay for this! I wanna be a billionaire!
Manager: actually it failed, we ran out of money, you no longer have a job... But at least we didn't build skynet, right?
[dead]