It is a bit scary how people seem to genuinely be OK with violence (see this reddit thread [0]). Is just me or does it feel like the overall "temperature" has gone up.
Well, dropping bombs and threatening to end a civilization certainly made me think the temperature had gone up. I’m not sure I think a single attempted act against some guy is worth being worried by against that backdrop.
I think much the reaction to the Brian Thompson killing also seemed ok with the violence despite it happening before the events you describe, though I guess that could be an outlier.
This is exactly the point of part one of Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence, by Geoffrey Canada. Unequal or lack of access to the executive branch of government will create a culture of vigilantism and lends itself to organized crime as a replacement for the policing arm of the state.
People become okay with vigilante justice when they see the executive branch as compromised, just look at the insane plot/ending of the film Singham.
Many people see this happening in the US. We should expect to see more vigilante justice and organized crime if we see the executive branch as having a significant principal-agent problem.
Organized crime is also going to escalate as the economic squeeze continues to hit white collar workers. Pumping out a bunch of computer science graduates and rendering them unemployable isn't going to lead to all of them giving up and working at Walmart. A certain amount are going to figure out that they can make a better living by going black hat. Likewise for all the office managers, etc. who are put out of a job as belts tighten. Threatening the livelihoods of people who were led to expect a certain standard of living and who can organize and exploit systems is exactly how you end up with organized crime. Doubly so when the burden is falling on the young, who have more appetite for risky decisions.
I wonder how much the complete impunity of those involved with Jeffery Epstein has destroyed the faith in the executive branch? People like Leon Black, Les Wexner and a couple of presidents not only escaped justice, but pretty much any scrutiny by any institution, media included. I think it's hard for people to look at that and not think they need to take the law into their own hands.
Not defending them or even Luigi but I would argue a lot of it is the abysmal labour institutions the USA got (lots of union busting, few modern laws against modern exploitation and classical institutions are undermined politically and legally).
And the growing class divide in the USA I think is the reason why folks are increasingly seeing violence against the upper class is seen as the only option.
Again doesn't mean it makes it right, but it explains why it is almost only an US phenomenon.
These are message boards. The obvious sentiment, that firebombing attacks are awful (perhaps cut a little bit with "the perpetrator appears to be someone deeply in need of help) is boring. This is an availability bias issue: the only sentiments that actually spool out into threads are edgy. Once you learn to spot these effects, message boards make a lot more sense and are less jarring.
It's an interesting exercise to compare these threads.
My own position on the matter is the not an edgy one: political violence of any kind, is never justified, but it does signal that something deep in society requires a change.
- Go onto a Reddit thread about ICE, everyone in the comment threads says they don't like ICE. That's the obvious statement, not edgy.
- Go onto a Reddit thread about Trump, everyone says they don't like Trump. That's the obvious statement, not edgy.
Why would we think the Sam Altman thread is any different? I unfortunately think the Reddit thread might be the real deal, or at least a little more real than you are saying.
I'm not saying that violence is legal -- which is definitely not. But it is part of the "packages" and totally depends on whether the one wants to use. Historically violence has been a very...effective tool.
When people feel that law and order do not protect them, some eventually will go "the extra mile" (somehow managers always like this phrase). It's not something we can prevent. It is human nature. I guess super riches really like AI because this gives them extra protection.
> it is part of the "packages" and totally depends on whether the one wants to use.
Could you explain what packages are and what depends on (what?)?
> Historically violence has been a very...effective tool.
This is dramatic sci-fi for anarchists of all political stripes.
The critical reality to understand is that violence is the most ineffective tool, causing catastrophic harm for others and outcomes that the perpetrators rarely control or foresee. Revolutions can overthrow status quo power but what follows is rarely what the perpetrators aimed for. The same happens in warfare - the outcome is rarely what anyone envisioned at the start, a fundamental lessons that experts try to teach hot-headed amateurs that think warfare will solve their problems.
It also establishes violence as legitimate - usable by everyone else too, a very bad outcome and the opposite of the rule of law, incompatible with freedom; it elevates violence and destruction over life and liberty. In contrast, the American Revolution was founded on principles of freedom and law (for example, in the Declaration of Independence), did not embrace violence as desireable, and laid it out for example in the Declaration of Independence.
The most successful societies have freedom, the rule of law, and allow violence only as a last necessity to restore freedom and the rule of law.
To play the advocatus diaboli: Violence is always condemned the most if it happens to a member of high society directly. The members many people on this very website picture themselves to be in the future. But if you structually starve half a continent to save a few cents on the dime or fire 30.000 workers that isn't only okay, it deserves a bonus.
If you call one violence but the other is okay because there are some layers of misdirection in between you may have to reconsider your ethics.
I don’t think it’s surprising - some people already consider the actions of AI execs and tech companies to be synonymous to violence. Like, comparing something like this to destroying the livelihoods of millions of people, a lot of people would consider the latter far worse.
Temperature is certainly going up, but it definitely hasn’t reached historic levels yet lol.
The Ministry of The Future (Kim Stanley Robinson) lays this scenario out clearly -- people will resort to violence to try to stop what they consider to be the destruction of their lives or society.
After watching children literally be liquified in Gaza for two years, violence directed at Sam Altman doesn’t even move the needle. Our entire human rights framework what obliterated by Israel (with the blessing and support of the US and Europe).
What do you mean by violence? Do you consider someone building a monster of a server farm near your home and messing up with your drinking water, electricity and life in general violence? Why violence is only immediate physical one that counts?
All of that has presumably gone through the proper public approval process. Just because you might think the process is flawed, does not justify retaliatory violence in a civilized society
People being okay with violence when they lose the democratic vote is a problem. The system isn't perfect, but again, if you're resorting to violence instead of campaigning for change, society either has to crush you, or we're all going to anarchy
As income/wealth inequality grows expect class violence to grow until there is a revolution. We let rich people get too rich and this is the consequence.
Sam has so far lost say $100B so far, and he is compensated by already being a billionaire. You can see how this might lead to disillusionment with the system.
It's gotten to the point that I walked in to some water cooler banter at work the other day, where they were discussing their favorite means of public execution.
It's not that people are accepting of violence. That doesn't just happen. Societies don't suddenly turn violent against the state. This only happens when the state has failed and become violent towards the people. If you're surprised by the rising level of violence toward the state, you haven't been paying attention to the rising violence towards the people.
The US was quite literally founded on the idea that it is an inarguable, fundamental human right to overthrow a tyrannical government. The nice and polite mechanisms for doing this have all been broken, removed, violently suppressed, or outright ignored. When there are no peaceful options left, humans will always revolt with as much violence as is necessary. History shows us this over and over. Violently oppressed societies don't tend to stay that way for long, and they certainly don't become hardline pacifists. They always eventually fight back, or they die.
The rising level of violence from the people at large is a proportional reaction to the increasing level of violence against the people. The level of tyranny has recently upgraded itself from merely an existential threat to the USA as a society, but also an existential threat to the entire damn planet. Of course the people are going to get violent. They feel there's no other choice, because all peaceful options have been exhausted and met with extreme violence.
That's the consensus I see on the street: all nonviolent options have been met with ever-increasingly extreme violence. When all peaceful options are removed, you pick the only one left.
In a historic lens, it's all very unsurprising. This is how revolutions happen. This is what humans have always done when met with tyranny and violent oppression. It's only surprising if you willfully ignore and excuse the tyranny and violence against the people.
Altman keeps on telling people he’s going to take away their jobs. He says that because it gets cred in tech circles, but in America this is an existential threat, not much different from telling someone “I’m going to break your kneecaps”. Of course some subset of people are going to respond with violence.
The sheer tone-deafness of AI marketing is going to come back to bite us very hard. This is probably just the beginning.
Yeah part of me thinks the reason we know all their claims are bullshit is because you’d have to be pretty dense to think that you could promise eliminate >50% of jobs in many high value sectors within 12-18 months and _not_ expect to create more than a few people who’d have nothing to lose…
Flip it round: if you have $999,999,999 then would it not be rational to expect random violence against oneself? I’m not saying it’s justifiable, just that it is prudent to expect to be targeted by crazies.
Flip it again: as a crazy, isn’t it reasonable to enact violence against Johnny Nine Nines? If he’s so innocent, how come his house is behind two security fences?
To be a little more reductive: my house is made of gold bricks so I hired an extra-legal anti-marauder militia, but now the marauders see me as a fair fight because I chose extra-legal militia instead of cops and judges… game on and QED.
Around 2014, a new political candidate entered the scene. Commenters and the news media at the time widely reported something remarkable and new about this candidate: he readily endorsed political violence and showed a continual pattern of escalation, never taking an off-ramp to lower the temperature in domestic politics. Over the years research has shown that the rhetoric of this candidate has materially contributed to political violence in the US. [0]
This candidate was later elected to office and in the time since has shown a continual pattern of endorsing violence. He has endorsed violent actions, told reactionary extremist groups to "stand back and stand by", defended state violence against protestors and immigrants, pardoned thousands of people who were convicted of political violence and an attempted insurrection, and recently started a war before threatening to destroy an entire civilization.
Yes. Yes the "temperature" has gone up. People have been talking about this WIDELY, for years now.
I simply make the observation that the 40-hour workweek took a bunch of violence to enable. As have other forms of progress that we take for granted. Luigi Mangione is a hero to many. It's not bad that the most powerful need to consider negative outcomes in their lives. Decry violence as one, sure, but if there are none other, psychopaths have no check on them. It'd be good if maybe there were others available, eh?
Ineffectual molotov cocktails are just a cry for help.
People are routinely killed for far less all over the world, including America. It's a fact of life.
Obviously people aren't going to be happy about debt fueled spending inflating prices and crashing the economy again (for the 4th time in most young people's lives).
Crazy people used to gun down schoolchildren who could be conveniently ignored. You can be sure that the ownership class won't just be sending thoughts and prayers here.
People are apathetic at this point. When a large amount of americans can barely afford to live while threatened with replacement while the economy booms on the backs of their claimed obsolescence, they don't care that a billionaire could've gotten hurt, especially when that billionaire is working against their interests.
The billionaire class has enabled armed masked police in our streets, endless layoffs, basically don't pay taxes at any reasonable percentage, and basically have rigged politics with Citizens United.
Given that, I can see how people are resorting to 18th century French tactics.
The top 1% of income earners pay 40% of all the federal taxes collected. The top 25% pay 89% of taxes.
Net of transfers, 60% of households receive more from government transfers than they pay in taxes.
The idea that rich people don't pay taxes is just not correct. The entire system is basically rich people subsidizing everybody else through byzantine distributional systems.
Your way of life is dependent on slave labor and military conquest.
Your only noticing the "temperature" going up now is just a sign of how privileged you have been to be able to ignore war and conflict that's existed around the globe since your birth.
The temperature has not gone up. You can't ignore the flames anymore.
it's a bit scary how a lot of people are completely fine with an insanely wrong status quo of a fully corrupt and anti democratic government and of ppl like Altman allying with them.
I don't condone violence, but it's hardly surprising that people would resort to or support it in this case, considering that by stepping in where Anthropic refused to help the US military, sama essentially agreed that OpenAI will serve as the IT Department for Trump's secret police. Either that, or he's willing for OpenAI to endure a similar punishment when he refuses the inevitable demand to assist with domestic mass surveillance.
I think you're extrapolating a lot from my comment... One can reasonably think something has to be done to address the current (and upcoming) economic situation and think that molotov cocktails won't help. Acts like these will likely make things much worse before settling into a new situation that's probably just slightly worse.
Get ready for more. If the tech bros are right and millions of people loose their jobs and healthcare, we are in for a rough couple of decades. Millions of angry people, with nothing to lose and a bunch of free time, all with one name in their heads, Sam Altman. He better start working on his robot army.
"Violence" does not only include "physical violence". It also includes "structural violence". And precisely, temperature is going up because people is sick of structural violence.
> You think people will put up with wildly accelerating inequality forever?
No. Nor do I think they should. But UBI, higher income tax at the top and a wealth tax for the ultra rich sound like a much better plan to me than to blow a bunch of things up.
- AI Psychosis is actively tearing apart families and communities, after social media and opioids have already had a pass.
- Negative social outcomes are in the service of _making money_. Not money to pay taxes to fund a healthy society, but money for the people running these systems.
Humans that lack community, safety, and purpose will embrace more drastic means of exerting control over their lives at the expense of others, no?
It is probably safe to say the temperature has been firmly up for a while. And certain subsets of the population have come to trust their Dear Leader's embrace of violence as a solution, for sure.
Jobs were already lost because of AI capital investments. None of the hyper scalers had the cash flow to support the target investment levels and had to reduce labor.
There was a rumor going around Silicon Valley that if ICE came to San Francisco in force that Mark Zuckerberg's house was going to go up in flames in retaliation. You will be surprised to learn that the oligarchs talked to Trump and they did not come.
It’s a distinct minority. They’re convinced they’re the majority because everyone they talk to is in the same bubble, especially online. I saw the same thing with Mangione and Kirk and Pelosi.
Do you spend much time with people not in the tech world? I think you'd be surprised how many people hold similar sentiments, even if not to such an extreme, especially once you talk to people in the real world. I've heard far more support for this sort of thing in real life than I have online due to fear of repercussions.
Hell, even the president regularly calls for and promotes violence, so I don't think it's that much of a minority. The US was founded on it, after all.
What I think is different today is -- regardless of how many people organically think this way -- social media is normalizing the idea. We're all being exposed to it.
It's only a minority of people who are radicalized, but it's a growing minority. Radical ideas are more accessible than ever for people to latch on to.
Radical views on violence, social relations, science, politics, distrust of institutions, etc are all way more common than they were in the 90s.
I think youre misreading it entirely, doesnt surprise me given that you're a VC.
Here's one of the posts on that thread: "I mean one thing is to use AI or even ChatGPT as a product, and another is being aware of how billionaires treat the rest of the people
As for Sam, he also has pretty controversial views for how this whole thing will pan out and how he doesn't give a shit about the consequences it might have for the rest of us. Also more recently, the whole Pentagon contract thing"
People can both use LLMs whilst having a distasteful view of the leaders of the industry.
Nowadays, it seems common for genocidal regimes to be supported by other countries, so it looks like abhorrent violence is just part of the world order.
The temperature has definitely gone up; one could look at what the current President says and has done for reasons why people might be on edge.
“I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less,” the president responded. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They don’t want to see crime.” ... The radicals on the left are the problem. They’re vicious, and they’re horrible,” Trump said. “And they’re politically savvy, although they want men in women’s sports. They want transgender for every one. They want open borders.
“I always say, we have two enemies … We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries … We have some very bad people; we have some sick people, radical-left lunatics. And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard—or, if really necessary, by the military.”
He reguarly referred to January 6th insurrectionists as "hostages" and "patriots" then gave them all a pardon. If you breach the capitol and interrupt election processes, injure/kill police officers, and chant "hang Mike Pence" then I guess you're a patriot worthy of a pardon.
The job market's shit, it's nearly impossible for young people to buy houses or pay rent, well paying jobs are disappearing to AI, inflation is sky rocketing and people are getting desperate. But then we're told the economy's doing great and billionaires like Musk and Altman are rolling in money.
Maybe because people got used to violence being used against them?
All this violence against the innocent in various places and levels, and you think it’s weird that people are fine with violence used against a billionaire conman?
I'm not saying throwing a MOlotov cocktail is ok. It's not. I think most people are analyzing the incident as being indicative of the times we're living in, particularly with the warehouse fire.
But where people are "OK with violence" is with state violence.
State violence include police violence (>1000 people are killed every year in the US by police), prison violence, violently rounding up immigrants and putting them in concentration camps, criminalizing homelessness, denying people life-saving medical care, evictions while landlords collude to raise rents, genocide, sending random people to a maximum security prison in a foreign country (ie CECOT), mass shootings, going with a firearm to a protest to instigate an incident and get a legal kill, intentionally creating the opiod crisis and so on.
For a large number of people some or all of these incidents will get a reaction somewhere between "thoughts and prayers" and "no, it's good actually".
Compare the state's reaction to one healthcare CEO being murdered and the perpetrators that are implicated in the Epstein files. Epstein himself was known to authorities since the 1990s and got an absolutely sweetheart deal in 2008.
So I'd say the real problem is what people view as violence and who's allowed to do it, seemingly without oversight or consequences of any kind most or all of the time.
AI company marketing is pretty overwhelmingly "we're going to take away your job and leave to you starve on the streets". People concluding that the public face of this is their enemy who must be stopped is just a really unsurprising outcome.
That is what Ilya (and many other employees) (fore)saw.
They did not want a target painted on their backs or being involved with the company responsible for mass job displacement.
Let's hope that SF doesn't turn into a free-for-all after the IPOs, since the silliest thing is for everyone to move to SF and buy up the houses and then the have-not's realise who got rich.
I'd donate that money away or give the employees (who have nothing) a one-time bonus / raise like the five-guys owner [0] to not be a target.
We can’t vote our way towards a better future. The corrupt MAGA and DNC institutions strangle any nascent grassroots movement in the crib. And we cannot make them relinquish their death grip on our country with only bare hands.
Seriously shocked that this is the aspect of this moment in history that you choose to focus on, and not the absurd levels of violence perpetrated by the ruling classes against common people.
I don't have a problem with violence, but I do take issue with the mass dismissal and outright hatred for AI by people who don't even understand what it is.
It absolutely has. Both the Left and the Right have seared consciences and take no issue with murder and thuggishness as long as it's "their guy" doing it to "the other guy".
The world was never a wise and virtuous man's paradise, but it has been quickly sliding into ever increasing and monstrous irrationality. Give Plato's "Republic" a read and you might find it concerning how closely we exemplify the last stages of political and social decline.
You mean like this article that has been making the rounds recently? The huge famous one that Altman himself called out in his post talking about the attack?
One thing I have idly wondered is how much do the ultra rich protect themselves from theft or kidnapping. Is it just not a real concern?
If Taylor Swift owns a dozen homes, does she have full time security guards at each one? Or just accept some amount of burglary may occur? Do they go everywhere with a guard? Only to public events?
It varies and they don't talk about it (obviously) but you can glean things from various sources. The more "public" the ultra rich are, the more they'll have security, especially noticeable security.
The silent or unknown ones will often still have something (usually a requirement of their or their company's insurance).
Once you graduate from "2, 3, 5 houses" to "mansions" you will have staff at each one, even if relatively bare-bones.
I once knew a guy that used to be head of physical security for Bill Gates. He has body guards with him all the time and a sizable security team at his home in Medina. You wouldn't believe the amount of lunatics that show up at his home unannounced and claim he promised them money (or are a relative of him somehow).
i once did a little project for the home in medina, i never went on site but i did visit the office of his property management company. Dozens of people for managing the properties and on-site staff for each as well as, i think, bgc3 but not the b&mgf.
To hear tell from my coworkers that did go on site the security was insane, the media apparatus was insane (like a dvr for every channel running 24x7 so the family could call up whatever, wherever they were at any time). This is back in like 2010ish, before the marriage blew up.
For a start, they have bodyguards and rarely go into public without the right protection. They also went through a huge amount putting up security and cybersecurity (like I know one who sets up so many hops between endpoints that Microsoft banned his account). Even most of their employees don't know where they are and where they plan to be, unless they choose to do so. Ofc I guess there is always a way to probe, but people who do random killing rarely has the skills/mental to do that.
> Kim Kardashian, testifying in the trial of the burglars accused of tying her up and robbing her at gunpoint nearly nine years ago, told a Paris court on Tuesday that she “absolutely thought” her assailants would kill her.
> “I have babies, I have to make it home, I have babies,” Kardashian recalled pleading with the armed men, who had broken into her hotel room while she slept during Paris Fashion Week in 2016.
> Facing her alleged attackers for the first time since the heist, the billionaire reality TV star detailed how she was robbed of nearly $10 million in cash and jewelry, including a $4 million engagement ring – gifted to her by her then-husband Kanye West – that was never recovered.
Whether you personally believe AI has cost jobs or not is irrelevant, in the last three years companies publicly and vocally have laid hundreds of thousands of layoffs at the feet of "AI".
I agree with you, it’s mostly hype. But it doesn’t really matter whether it’s true or not because the vibes are clearly bad. These execs keep “warning” us about that AI will take all the jobs then keep pouring more money into AI, the press credulously reports it, and people are obviously worried. Most people aren’t digging through economic data themselves to figure out these execs are full of shit.
Whether "the jobs" have been lost or not is irrelevant. There's something to be said of the leadership here raising a trillion dollars to do that very thing.
It's not hard to imagine an outsider taking him at face value.
If this guy says publicly, "I'm building a robot that is going to fundamentally change the economy by making most knowledge based jobs obsolete." Then proceeds to play a major role in propping up the economy on this idea.
Sf Chronicle speaks of an "alleged attack", where a Molotov Cocktail was thrown at the outer gate. Looking at the picture there was zero chance of the house catching fire.
So the arrested suspect is either the wrong person, did not actually want to kill anyone or has no clue how fire spreads.
A strange incident that will make many people think of sending a noose to oneself (where oneself does not have to be Altman, but a pro-AI org who wants to generate sympathy).
I don't think most people in tech are quite aware of the level of visceral AI hatred amongst non-techies. I've personally witnessed the worst Thanksgiving dinnertable fight I've ever seen (after someone revealed that their recipe was AI-generated, a couple people literally spat out the food they were enjoying and threw their plates in the trash), and a divorce (a very solid marriage between two people who were once both staunchly anti-AI unraveled within weeks after one of them changed their tune and adopted AI at work).
People talk about AI getting things wrong all the time, why is it "so clearly irrational" to be doubtful of a recipe that might include ingredients that can make you sick?
I could see being concerned about food safety; I wouldn't trust an AI recipe to tell me how long/what temperature to cook chicken, and I might not trust someone who uses AI to generate recipes to know either.
I interpret it as an expression of disgust. Similar to how people will stop reading and throw away a good book when they learn the author is a morally reprehensible person.
The very fact that your takeaway from that story was "look at how dumb my enemies are" is why this is a conflict worth worrying about.
Are you right? Yeah, basically. Are you going to laugh at your stupid neighbors until they burn your house down in rage? Maybe? You don't treat fear with malice.
I mostly agree that it's an overreaction. However, "irrational" is a really bad choice of word. Every non-technical person understands that sometimes AI says wrong things - like, random, crazy wrong things, not just a little off. It's just a general rule kept in the back of the mind. Food is easily in that realm of "be careful". Did the AI produce a recipe that would be harmful to you and the cook didn't notice? Almost certainly not. So, sure, they were being over-cautious. But "irrational"? No, no, no. It's definitely rational.
Look at what you're writing.
"Doing X is so clearly irrational that I chuckled a bit."
Please don't perpetuate the image of the elitist techie. That is what was just firebombed.
Well, Sam Altman and Jensen Huang are going around bragging about how many people they're going to push out of employment. Might have something to do with it.
My experience is somewhat in the middle -- I see educated non-technical people who are strongly against AI because they see it as polluting, "wasting water", and harmful to society. Although many use it anyway.
I could totally believe uneducated or less well-adjusted people reacting in the above way, though.
The hatred is particularly intense on reddit. I lost a couple of accounts there to suspension, just for speaking a civil way about the positive aspects of AI.
My wife runs a food blog and sometimes uses AI to come up with recipes she tests on us first. One of the best dishes she’s ever made (and one of the best I’ve ever eaten) was pork with an apricot sauce. The pork was fine, but the sauce was absolutely incredible! I’d put it on any kind of meat. Funny thing is, I don’t even like apricots, but the sauce was amazing.
My wife does have one advantage, which is that she knows when the AI has hallucinated something crazy and makes appropriate adjustments. I guess it's like anything. AI can be a big help to those who already have a threshold level of background knowledge in a field but can cause big problems for those who don't.
You might call me a "techie" and I both use AI and have very strong anti-AI sentiment. I don't think this is a contradiction, because I believe while the technology itself is not bad, the way that people use it definitely is.
People trust AI outputs in ways they should not. They don't understand its sycophantic design and succumb to AI psychosis. They deploy it in antisocial ways, for war, or spam, or scams. They use it to justify layoffs. They use it as a justification to gobble up public funds. They use it to power their winner-take-all late-stage capitalism economy. It goes on and on.
Indeed, but the rage I've seen during political fights at family gatherings (and another politics-induced divorce) pales in comparison to the rage I saw in these two anecdotes. The worst political debates I've seen involved raised voices and some name calling, not spitting food and smashing plates. The only other political divorce I've seen slowly simmered over a few years after Trump was first elected, not in a literal matter of weeks.
I must live in the upside down. If there are any ardent anti-AI people I come across they're techies. Whereas non-techies are either oblivious or completely and comically locked-in as caricatured in that South Park episode.
The remarkable part of your anecdote is the behavior. Seems to me some humans nowadays are less tolerant of any difference in opinion, AI is just the current reason to pick a fight.
Wonder why that is, and if we'll grow out of it peacefully.
It’ll quiet down once we make it illegal and/or justification to be committed to an asylum to have opinions we don’t like - the way it was in the old, tolerant days.
I would absolutely stop eating a meal if I learned AI was involved in creating it. I suppose I wouldn't literally spit it out but I wouldn't take another bite.
It's quite prevalent in tech too-- however, folks tend to be quiet because the "use AI for everything or else" hammer is being used across the industry.
Not just non-techies. Plenty of techies share that same visceral hatred. Some of them even use these tools themselves, because it’s a complicated issue with nuances.
Yep, all of us with a clue are keeping our traps shut at work, or even boosting it or slapping it onto projects that don't need it, because this is clearly one of those things where attempting to offer counsel and advice that's contrary to the way the MBA winds are blowing can only hurt your career.
From my own perspective, the "visceral hatred" isn't so much at AI (which I use almost exclusively to generate funny pictures of myself and coworkers) but at the executives that view it as a way to enshittify society.
turning myself (an overweight bearded guy) into an animated hula dancer and turning my coworker into the Terminator and sinking into molten steel don't seem to inspire the same hatred. unless you don't like hula dancers.
Anecdotal. I can't stand generative AI. I wouldn't mind if a friend used stable diffusion to make a pic of their D&D character. I would be very mad if Wizards of the Coast used AI instead of artists in their next source book.
Nothing has made me lose hope in the masses more than seeing how much bile is being spewed over a net positive innovation. People will hate AI first after others tell them to, then try to come up with illogical (and often hypocritical) reasoning afterwards to try and justify their prejudice.
I don't think most people in tech are quite aware of the level of visceral AI hatred amongst non-techies.
I work in a non-tech industry and I see this all the time from people, but it's not just limited to AI. SV itself evokes hatred in a lot of people on both sides of the spectrum.
I can't repeat the worst things I've heard, but Altman and his ilk should be terrified of the mob violence they're instigating.
Ironically I have noticed it's techies and white collar workers who fear and/or loathe AI the most. Why? Cause they're the most likely whose jobs have been threatened by it or have already been superseded by it.
My blue collar work buddies don't feel as strongly or as existential about it. To them, it's just this buzzwordy crap that has ruined entertainment or made the quality of services even worse. It's more of an annoyance than an outright fear and/or loathing of it.
Maybe if the bubble pops and the economy tanks and it affects their bottom line they might hate it as much as the aforementioned people.
I think techies and white collar workers are more likely to see what is coming with AI.
Example: in the very best case, every call center worker will be replaced with a chatbot. Service quality will be worse. Any situation out of the norm will be way more frustrating. It will be buggy. It will get into loops. And there will be no human contact to break the cycle.
I think that's the dynamic that worries people the most - their bank, their landlord, maybe even their 911 service all replaced with something that is even less responsive and even less accountable.
Most SV people live in a bubble inside of a bubble. They don’t understand how their words come across to a significant portion of the population. If they did they would shut the fuck up.
Silicon Valley just means a concentration of influential and powerful actors including venture capitalists, executives, entrepreneurs who decide the fate of the technology industry. Basically the elites of the XYZ sector.
Same can be applied for DC (politics/military), NY (finance), LA (entertainment).
SV was around since the 60-90s but didn't get much attention until beginning of this millenium due to the huge value creation and control they had over the US economy. They just happen to be relevant in recent times. 100s of years ago it was the railroad and oil conglomerates, 1000s of years ago kings and feudal lords. So there is always a powerful influential class who controls the strings -- its a feature of human society.
They are pretty good friends of mine and I never sensed any tension. It really was a marriage-ending bolt out of the blue, like discovering an affair or severe financial infidelity.
TBH people in AI may also resent AI, because they are the first to be impacted by AI. They just don't say openly because frankly no one wants to lose his/her job.
I think you're just in a strange bubble of people because those are absolutely comical responses to learning of AI. I do know some people who are for or anti AI to a stronger extent, but most of those I know simply don't give a shit, they'll use AI if it's there, such as for their job or to ask an LLM questions, but otherwise not think about it.
Crypto doesn't get that much hatred, since you don't need to participate in the space even in non-techies circles. But it doesn't affect them and it can be safely ignored in its own bubble.
Mentioning "AI" in non-techies circles is a bad idea. It tells you that many here are in a massive bubble and unaware of the visceral hate against AI because it directly affects them and they cannot opt-out.
Given that AI takes more than it gives back (jobs, energy, water, houses) of course you will get anti-AI activists.
Except when you’re the victim of ransomware that extorts you to pay some bitcoin. But it seems that fewer people have encountered that than having AI forced upon them.
> after someone revealed that their recipe was AI-generated, a couple people literally spat out the food they were enjoying and threw their plates in the trash
Not entirely unwarranted given the track record of LLMs as a chef though:
Of course it was two years ago and it's unlikely to happen again, but that's the drawback of the “move fast and break things” attitude: sometimes you've broken public perception and it's hard to fix afterwards.
The idea that AI will bring an age of abundance may be true, but not in the short term. Companies are letting people go, and AI will be blamed for that, whether true or not. For decades the public perception that most Tech Bros have prioritized profits over the wellbeing of the little guy is well established, in my view, in some cases well deserved with no accountability.
It's looking like AI will generate a modern version of the early 1800s Luddite Rebellion where British textile workers destroyed machines that displaced jobs, prioritizing factory owners' profits over workers. They targeted technology and industrialists.
Tech Bros can avoid this by modifying their priorities, prioritize employee rights and lobbying governments to begin implementing some sort of Universal Basic Income of some sort and or provide the means by which people can survive, or the government may start marketing Soylent Green to consumers :(
I'd say an important distinction is AI is currently threatening to displace a significantly larger number of jobs across multiple sectors. Whether it can/will actually happen is yet to be seen, but the potential amount of scorned people with nothing to lose is far greater this time.
I agree. It's hard to know, but if it were me that's creating this type of economy, an uncertain economy which may/may not bring about all these changes, I'd modify the approach to account for any potential human displacement, just in case it does come about.
The outlook from my view, though limited, is so pessimistic that I just keep thinking about a scenario similar to, though not AI-related, Soylent Green or Great Ravine from The Dark Forest, Volume 2 of Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy (aka The Three-Body Problem series).
I keep hoping I come across a 1973 Ford Falcon XB GT Coupe aka "V8 Interceptor" or "Pursuit Special," when all hell breaks loose :|
> It's looking like AI will generate a modern version of the early 1800s Luddite Rebellion where British textile workers destroyed machines that displaced jobs, prioritizing factory owners' profits over workers. They targeted technology and industrialists.
It's worth remembering that the way that ended was extremely bloody, particularly for the Luddites themselves. There were a handful of extreme participants, there was a murder, and there was a hell of a lot of violence directed at anyone perceived as a Luddite— even though most actual Luddites themselves mostly avoided violence against other humans.
It would be good if we can somehow avoid such outcomes this time.
Greed drives most of the current crop of Tech Bros.
I once had the chance to be a Bro, far richer than any of the current ones, thanks to the still secretive and anonymous "original-sn-adjacent cryptographic collective". Things, however, did not work out in my favor thanks to other nefarious third-party actors. So, I know where from I speak.
Any outcome is in the hands of the Tech Bros but by the looks of it, greed drives their every action, so things are not looking good!
This will only get worse imo - regardless of how Sam is perceived - there is anger against AI which is growing amongst the people. I think we as a society need to stop and have the conversation and be more thoughtful about how we integrate AI with everything.
More thoughtful? How about we don't integrate AI with everything as we seem to be polluting and burning down the planet just to keep AI running. There's also the rampant copyright infringing just to train the models, so I think we need to figure out how to correctly punish the AI executives first for breaking laws on such a large scale.
I don't think this is possible yet, because many people refuse to think AI would be eventually better than us at practically anything (at least anything virtual), they keep talking about what's "current" while I think it's completely irrelevant for that discussion, people need to assume extreme intelligence and orchestration tools (and robots) will be there, worldwide, it's a *fact*, not just a maybe.
It is actually entirely possible to discuss a solution for something that may or may not happen. If a hurricane is approaching, we don't typically require every person to agree the odds of landfall are 100% to start preparing shelters and stockpiling aid nearby. Not everything in the world is about the "AI skeptics" on the internet being dumb and wrong unlike you.
No surprise given that a full quarter of these on one side of the political spectrum consider political violence acceptable (~25%. Same figure is 9% for self-identified moderates, 3% for the other side).
Source: https://rb.gy/wdzmsc (YouGov poll, n=2,646, date = sep 10, 2025, question = "Do you think it is ever justified for citizens to resort to violence in order to achieve political goals? (%)", raw data linked under poll graph, downloadable )
Yes political violence is NEVER justifiable. That is the one and only correct answer if you wish to live in a modern society. And believe me, you do not want to live in the other kind
It's clear that there is a huge bias depending on how the question is phrased. All those conservatives who say that political violence is unacceptable would answer differently if it's phrased in terms relative to the second amendment.
One just needs to observe current events to understand that a large portion of ahem "the other side" either fail to understand what "political violence" is, or are simply lying about whether it can ever be justified.
It's currently in vogue for "the other side" to decry political violence; of course they will say it is not justified in a 2025 poll. The only problem is that it is blatantly contradicted by the political violence which is perpetrated and excused by "the other side".
It will be hard to convince them otherwise when their jobs are replaced with AI, and they are in their late 40s or later - with no time to adjust and to learn new craft.
Like another commenter wrote... anyone can cast a fireball. Sam has been called a sociopath by many who know him personally. So it seems more likely than it might be otherwise.
I’m surprised we haven’t heard more direct action incidents - there is no way the shameless behavior of our high profile oligarchs is not ruffling a few feathers too much.
Definitely deplorable. If he is as many claim him to be, and the info about pushing hard to control the narrative recently is accurate, the timing certainly is suspect. But part of the point of a false flag is to make it hard to discuss whether it is a false flag, and ideally to see that it is never determined one way or another.
It certainly is a highly convenient timing just before the Musk lawsuit against OpenAI.
Only minor damage was caused to a metal gate far from the building. Yet people here speak of "bombing Altman". So the sympathy works, and might work on the jury in that trial as well.
to the people on HN who are against blockchain but bullish on AI
With blockchain and smart contracts or stupid even memecoins, you can only lose what you voluntarily put in. You had to jump through a few hoops, then maybe you got rugpulled, maybe you became a millionaire.
With AI, regardless of whether you consented or not, you can lose your job, gradually your relationships and sense of purpose. And if some malicious actors want to weaponize it against you, you can lose your reputation, your freedom, get hacked at scale, and much more. The sooner we give biolabs to everyone the sooner someone can create an advanced persistent threat virus online infecting every openclaw machine, or a designer virus with an incubation period of half a year.
And I know what someone on here will always say. There will always be a comment to the effect of "this has always existed, AI is nothing new". But quantity has a quality all its own. Enjoy your AI slop internet dark forest. Until you don't.
Is your definition of bullish "believes the technology will be widely adopted across society and accrue significant wealth to its owners?" - if so, I think it's very clear how someone could be bullish on AI and not blockchain. You don't have to like AI to see it as an inexorable transformer (ha!) of society and wealth.
Is your definition of bullish "believes the technology is a major net good for society?" - if so, you're comparing two technologies with significant social aspirations that come from very different philosophical backgrounds. While both are techno-optimist, Blockchain is a fundamentally libertarian technology, while generative AI comes from a more utilitarian, capital-focused background. People who value individual freedom above all else will get excited about blockchain and feel mixed-to-negative about AI, while people who want to elevate the overall capability of the human race to the exclusion of anything else will get excited by AI and see blockchain as a parlor trick.
You should link to the actual source and include the archive link as the post text or as a top-level comment. The domain displayed next to the link will otherwise be the archive domain, which does not inform readers about the source.
Also, @mentions are not implemented on HN; email hn@ycombinator.com to get mod attention. (And you can confirm with them what I wrote about archive links.)
The link goes to a dead post (because archive - but there's nothing to merge), you're posting to an account that has posted/failed with archive links before and used @ before.. not sure what you're hoping for here.
The problem here is that there are no viable solutions to what happens when AI eventually replaces (yes replaces) tens of millions of humans in white collar roles.
All that is being "promised" are vague claims of "abundance". But all I see is this:
"AGI" is going to bring abundance of lots of very angry people and UBI to no-one (because it can never work at a large sustainable scale).
Some people are starting to realise that "AGI" was a grift and a scam and they are not happy about this lie and the insiders knew that and increased spending on security and private bodyguards.
I don't think the LLM will produce AGI. Just based on how context windows work, the prompt cycle, etc. LLMs aren't out there thinking about stuff in their spare time. The way they appear to have thoughts and a psyche is purely an illusion.
Something I often think about is how we can barely define what AGI, consciousness, etc are. We may be pretty sure that what we have currently is an illusion, but at which point is the illusion good enough that it no longer matters? Especially with regards to my first question.
It's hard to say it's not X when we can't really define X.
It doesn't have to produce AGI and it could still ruin the lives of millions of people. Our society isn't ready for that kind of shock. We can't all be instagram influencers.
Ministry of the Future beat you to the punch with victims of human driven climate change shooting down thousands of private planes with drones as protest.
One of the biggest fantasies in that book is that the "protesters" would be so unified and ethical in their plots.
In real life the attacks in response to climate change(and in this case, economic injustice), will be committed by such an uncountable plurality of groups that the violence will seem almost capricious.
This is condescending and unfair. Altman, OpenAI, and the media have spent years making Altman the face of AI. His company has (by far) the largest market cap, does the most deals, and has the most users.
I suspect Anthropic/Claude will become as much of a household name as ChatGPT, but it's not even close yet. ChatGPT is almost a generic term for AI chatbots at the moment.
An impostor is an impostor, no matter what the media makes them. Tbh, it's ok that the plates brake into his head since he has done so many bad things previously, he deserves it.
It seems Sam Altman has the same suspicion, based upon his response:
> There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago. Someone said to me yesterday they thought it was coming at a time of great anxiety about AI and that it made things more dangerous for me.
Unlikely – no one is starting off undecided, then reading one article in The New Yorker and then committing this. And it's a slippery slope to tie it to legitimate criticism.
I guess this is what we get when the media and politicians go all in with their AI populist hate. I don't think I've seen a positive AI headline outside of the tech press, and even then they are pretty thin. Abundance and growing the pie for everyone is also an outcome if this is done right.
> Abundance and growing the pie for everyone is also an outcome if this is done right.
That’s like saying we don’t need minimum wage or unions because companies choosing to treat workers with respect is also a possible outcome. It’s technically true but once you go from “is this theoretically possible?” to “is this likely?” it becomes obvious that the answer is no. Most of the big AI backers are openly salivating at destroying millions of jobs, and they’re already evading taxes now so they’re not going to be funding UBI willingly — and if you have any doubt, look at where their political spending goes, consistently to the people who are doing their best to remove what small taxes they’re still paying and declaring war on the concept of regulated markets.
or, here me out, people are just sick of it? They don't care that their masters are sniffing eachothers ai powered farts to keep the economy afloat on the promise of their obsolescence. Sure, in theory it could be good for them, they can get more work done quickly, but why would they be kept alive if their owners no longer need to rely on them. The ideal business has no expenses, workers are one of those. Combine that with everything being shit nowadays, yeah, I can't blame whoever did this
It is a bit scary how people seem to genuinely be OK with violence (see this reddit thread [0]). Is just me or does it feel like the overall "temperature" has gone up.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1shugf8/firebomb_t...
Well, dropping bombs and threatening to end a civilization certainly made me think the temperature had gone up. I’m not sure I think a single attempted act against some guy is worth being worried by against that backdrop.
I think much the reaction to the Brian Thompson killing also seemed ok with the violence despite it happening before the events you describe, though I guess that could be an outlier.
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Yeah, only 2 posts in and you're already talking about Putin.
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This is exactly the point of part one of Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence, by Geoffrey Canada. Unequal or lack of access to the executive branch of government will create a culture of vigilantism and lends itself to organized crime as a replacement for the policing arm of the state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fist%2C_Stick%2C_Knife%2C_Gun
People become okay with vigilante justice when they see the executive branch as compromised, just look at the insane plot/ending of the film Singham.
Many people see this happening in the US. We should expect to see more vigilante justice and organized crime if we see the executive branch as having a significant principal-agent problem.
Re: Organized crime.
Organized crime is also going to escalate as the economic squeeze continues to hit white collar workers. Pumping out a bunch of computer science graduates and rendering them unemployable isn't going to lead to all of them giving up and working at Walmart. A certain amount are going to figure out that they can make a better living by going black hat. Likewise for all the office managers, etc. who are put out of a job as belts tighten. Threatening the livelihoods of people who were led to expect a certain standard of living and who can organize and exploit systems is exactly how you end up with organized crime. Doubly so when the burden is falling on the young, who have more appetite for risky decisions.
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We gave up violence and made the state the authority but thats contingent on the social contract being upheld.
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I wonder how much the complete impunity of those involved with Jeffery Epstein has destroyed the faith in the executive branch? People like Leon Black, Les Wexner and a couple of presidents not only escaped justice, but pretty much any scrutiny by any institution, media included. I think it's hard for people to look at that and not think they need to take the law into their own hands.
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> just look at the insane plot/ending of the film Singham.
What does that even mean?
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Not defending them or even Luigi but I would argue a lot of it is the abysmal labour institutions the USA got (lots of union busting, few modern laws against modern exploitation and classical institutions are undermined politically and legally).
And the growing class divide in the USA I think is the reason why folks are increasingly seeing violence against the upper class is seen as the only option.
Again doesn't mean it makes it right, but it explains why it is almost only an US phenomenon.
> explains why it is almost only an US phenomenon
Genuine question: is it?
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What do you mean by “or even Luigi”?
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"protest without a disruption is just a parade"
These are message boards. The obvious sentiment, that firebombing attacks are awful (perhaps cut a little bit with "the perpetrator appears to be someone deeply in need of help) is boring. This is an availability bias issue: the only sentiments that actually spool out into threads are edgy. Once you learn to spot these effects, message boards make a lot more sense and are less jarring.
Another good thread to follow is the murdering of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42317604
It's an interesting exercise to compare these threads.
My own position on the matter is the not an edgy one: political violence of any kind, is never justified, but it does signal that something deep in society requires a change.
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Besides I think the sentiment would be very different if anyone actually got hurt.
"causing a fire to an exterior gate" doesn't lead me to believe there was any chance of real harm.
And the same applies to HN? Edgy messages make it to the top, and the reader should learn to react accordingly (in what way?)
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I think this is a little too optimistic:
- Go onto a Reddit thread about ICE, everyone in the comment threads says they don't like ICE. That's the obvious statement, not edgy.
- Go onto a Reddit thread about Trump, everyone says they don't like Trump. That's the obvious statement, not edgy.
Why would we think the Sam Altman thread is any different? I unfortunately think the Reddit thread might be the real deal, or at least a little more real than you are saying.
I'm not saying that violence is legal -- which is definitely not. But it is part of the "packages" and totally depends on whether the one wants to use. Historically violence has been a very...effective tool.
When people feel that law and order do not protect them, some eventually will go "the extra mile" (somehow managers always like this phrase). It's not something we can prevent. It is human nature. I guess super riches really like AI because this gives them extra protection.
> Historically violence has been a very...effective tool.
What to you mean historically? Violence backs every government decree from speeding tickets to the maximum water flow rate of urinals.
Overwhelming violence is something that people will go to amazing lengths and spend nearly all of their economic surplus to avoid.
Seems like its legal if you can pay for it today.
Of course violence is legal. Laws themselves carry no weight if they aren't backed by a credible threat of violence.
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> it is part of the "packages" and totally depends on whether the one wants to use.
Could you explain what packages are and what depends on (what?)?
> Historically violence has been a very...effective tool.
This is dramatic sci-fi for anarchists of all political stripes.
The critical reality to understand is that violence is the most ineffective tool, causing catastrophic harm for others and outcomes that the perpetrators rarely control or foresee. Revolutions can overthrow status quo power but what follows is rarely what the perpetrators aimed for. The same happens in warfare - the outcome is rarely what anyone envisioned at the start, a fundamental lessons that experts try to teach hot-headed amateurs that think warfare will solve their problems.
It also establishes violence as legitimate - usable by everyone else too, a very bad outcome and the opposite of the rule of law, incompatible with freedom; it elevates violence and destruction over life and liberty. In contrast, the American Revolution was founded on principles of freedom and law (for example, in the Declaration of Independence), did not embrace violence as desireable, and laid it out for example in the Declaration of Independence.
The most successful societies have freedom, the rule of law, and allow violence only as a last necessity to restore freedom and the rule of law.
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To play the advocatus diaboli: Violence is always condemned the most if it happens to a member of high society directly. The members many people on this very website picture themselves to be in the future. But if you structually starve half a continent to save a few cents on the dime or fire 30.000 workers that isn't only okay, it deserves a bonus.
If you call one violence but the other is okay because there are some layers of misdirection in between you may have to reconsider your ethics.
It's due to the widening inequality. Nick Hanauer has been talking about this for over ten years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2gO4DKVpa8
I don’t think it’s surprising - some people already consider the actions of AI execs and tech companies to be synonymous to violence. Like, comparing something like this to destroying the livelihoods of millions of people, a lot of people would consider the latter far worse.
Temperature is certainly going up, but it definitely hasn’t reached historic levels yet lol.
Structural violence is the term most commonly used for this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence
The Ministry of The Future (Kim Stanley Robinson) lays this scenario out clearly -- people will resort to violence to try to stop what they consider to be the destruction of their lives or society.
I do not think that marketing products and services that do useful work is “violence.”
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Silent corruption at the top causes rot at the bottom. Obvious corruption at the top causes desperation at the bottom.
After watching children literally be liquified in Gaza for two years, violence directed at Sam Altman doesn’t even move the needle. Our entire human rights framework what obliterated by Israel (with the blessing and support of the US and Europe).
What do you mean by violence? Do you consider someone building a monster of a server farm near your home and messing up with your drinking water, electricity and life in general violence? Why violence is only immediate physical one that counts?
All of that has presumably gone through the proper public approval process. Just because you might think the process is flawed, does not justify retaliatory violence in a civilized society
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It used to be a little less violent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEMbp6Epfz8
People are okay with violence when democratic means (if first past the post even counts) do not solve their problems.
People being okay with violence when they lose the democratic vote is a problem. The system isn't perfect, but again, if you're resorting to violence instead of campaigning for change, society either has to crush you, or we're all going to anarchy
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people are never OK with violence against human beings.
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It is scary. You know what’s also scary? Being told a robot is going to take your job and healthcare away.
There’s a lot of scary shit going on.
Also scary: Seeing a comment this ostensibly un-controversial in grey.
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I agree it is scary, but why would a robot take healthcare away? Wouldn't that be the contrary?
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the narrative im hearing is AI breakthroughs will drive the cost of healthcare to zero (i.e. Alphafold etc)
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People thought grand theft auto would do it, but in the end it was twitter and facebook.
GINI index in SF is pretty close to Brazil.
As income/wealth inequality grows expect class violence to grow until there is a revolution. We let rich people get too rich and this is the consequence.
Sam has so far lost say $100B so far, and he is compensated by already being a billionaire. You can see how this might lead to disillusionment with the system.
It's gotten to the point that I walked in to some water cooler banter at work the other day, where they were discussing their favorite means of public execution.
It's not that people are accepting of violence. That doesn't just happen. Societies don't suddenly turn violent against the state. This only happens when the state has failed and become violent towards the people. If you're surprised by the rising level of violence toward the state, you haven't been paying attention to the rising violence towards the people.
The US was quite literally founded on the idea that it is an inarguable, fundamental human right to overthrow a tyrannical government. The nice and polite mechanisms for doing this have all been broken, removed, violently suppressed, or outright ignored. When there are no peaceful options left, humans will always revolt with as much violence as is necessary. History shows us this over and over. Violently oppressed societies don't tend to stay that way for long, and they certainly don't become hardline pacifists. They always eventually fight back, or they die.
The rising level of violence from the people at large is a proportional reaction to the increasing level of violence against the people. The level of tyranny has recently upgraded itself from merely an existential threat to the USA as a society, but also an existential threat to the entire damn planet. Of course the people are going to get violent. They feel there's no other choice, because all peaceful options have been exhausted and met with extreme violence.
That's the consensus I see on the street: all nonviolent options have been met with ever-increasingly extreme violence. When all peaceful options are removed, you pick the only one left.
In a historic lens, it's all very unsurprising. This is how revolutions happen. This is what humans have always done when met with tyranny and violent oppression. It's only surprising if you willfully ignore and excuse the tyranny and violence against the people.
Altman keeps on telling people he’s going to take away their jobs. He says that because it gets cred in tech circles, but in America this is an existential threat, not much different from telling someone “I’m going to break your kneecaps”. Of course some subset of people are going to respond with violence.
The sheer tone-deafness of AI marketing is going to come back to bite us very hard. This is probably just the beginning.
Yep. Just wait until a large group of people (talking millions of people at once) lose their jobs. They will want someone to blame.
And I have no sympathy because this joker has been pushing people to the edge with his hyping.
Yeah part of me thinks the reason we know all their claims are bullshit is because you’d have to be pretty dense to think that you could promise eliminate >50% of jobs in many high value sectors within 12-18 months and _not_ expect to create more than a few people who’d have nothing to lose…
Flip it round: if you have $999,999,999 then would it not be rational to expect random violence against oneself? I’m not saying it’s justifiable, just that it is prudent to expect to be targeted by crazies.
Flip it again: as a crazy, isn’t it reasonable to enact violence against Johnny Nine Nines? If he’s so innocent, how come his house is behind two security fences?
To be a little more reductive: my house is made of gold bricks so I hired an extra-legal anti-marauder militia, but now the marauders see me as a fair fight because I chose extra-legal militia instead of cops and judges… game on and QED.
Around 2014, a new political candidate entered the scene. Commenters and the news media at the time widely reported something remarkable and new about this candidate: he readily endorsed political violence and showed a continual pattern of escalation, never taking an off-ramp to lower the temperature in domestic politics. Over the years research has shown that the rhetoric of this candidate has materially contributed to political violence in the US. [0]
This candidate was later elected to office and in the time since has shown a continual pattern of endorsing violence. He has endorsed violent actions, told reactionary extremist groups to "stand back and stand by", defended state violence against protestors and immigrants, pardoned thousands of people who were convicted of political violence and an attempted insurrection, and recently started a war before threatening to destroy an entire civilization.
Yes. Yes the "temperature" has gone up. People have been talking about this WIDELY, for years now.
[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/26940036?seq=1
The wild part about that is that the r/ChatGPT sub.
Which is very AI forward.
Scary but also entirely predictable and expected.
- High wealth inequality
- Perceived inability (or reduced ability) to get ahead and have your voice heard
- Government seen as more corrupt and benefiting the elite. Different set of rules for them vs for everyone else
- Highly polarized population at odds with each other
He switched to supporting Trump after Trump repeatedly joked about someone breaking into a San Fransisco home to attack the owners with a hammer.
So the temperature has been high for a while and he's on board with it.
Didn't that already happen with Pelosi?
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I simply make the observation that the 40-hour workweek took a bunch of violence to enable. As have other forms of progress that we take for granted. Luigi Mangione is a hero to many. It's not bad that the most powerful need to consider negative outcomes in their lives. Decry violence as one, sure, but if there are none other, psychopaths have no check on them. It'd be good if maybe there were others available, eh?
Ineffectual molotov cocktails are just a cry for help.
People are routinely killed for far less all over the world, including America. It's a fact of life.
Obviously people aren't going to be happy about debt fueled spending inflating prices and crashing the economy again (for the 4th time in most young people's lives).
Yes, the temperature has gone up. And we all know exactly who sits at the top of it all.
It's bad but this is what happens when people think they're not being heard and respected. I expect a lot more of this in the future.
The replies to your comment help make your point. These people genuinely think violence is fine, inevitable and justified.
Crazy people have existed since the dawn of time: I see nothing at all new here about a crazy person doing something crazy.
Crazy people used to gun down schoolchildren who could be conveniently ignored. You can be sure that the ownership class won't just be sending thoughts and prayers here.
People are apathetic at this point. When a large amount of americans can barely afford to live while threatened with replacement while the economy booms on the backs of their claimed obsolescence, they don't care that a billionaire could've gotten hurt, especially when that billionaire is working against their interests.
I mean, it's also scary because I don't think it works. People should demand a new deal and lobby for that. Throwing molotovs doesn't help with that.
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I don't condone it, but I understand the anger.
The billionaire class has enabled armed masked police in our streets, endless layoffs, basically don't pay taxes at any reasonable percentage, and basically have rigged politics with Citizens United.
Given that, I can see how people are resorting to 18th century French tactics.
The top 1% of income earners pay 40% of all the federal taxes collected. The top 25% pay 89% of taxes.
Net of transfers, 60% of households receive more from government transfers than they pay in taxes.
The idea that rich people don't pay taxes is just not correct. The entire system is basically rich people subsidizing everybody else through byzantine distributional systems.
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Your way of life is dependent on slave labor and military conquest.
Your only noticing the "temperature" going up now is just a sign of how privileged you have been to be able to ignore war and conflict that's existed around the globe since your birth.
The temperature has not gone up. You can't ignore the flames anymore.
it's a bit scary how a lot of people are completely fine with an insanely wrong status quo of a fully corrupt and anti democratic government and of ppl like Altman allying with them.
I don't condone violence, but it's hardly surprising that people would resort to or support it in this case, considering that by stepping in where Anthropic refused to help the US military, sama essentially agreed that OpenAI will serve as the IT Department for Trump's secret police. Either that, or he's willing for OpenAI to endure a similar punishment when he refuses the inevitable demand to assist with domestic mass surveillance.
You're just a smidge away from asking why they can't just eat cake...
I think you're extrapolating a lot from my comment... One can reasonably think something has to be done to address the current (and upcoming) economic situation and think that molotov cocktails won't help. Acts like these will likely make things much worse before settling into a new situation that's probably just slightly worse.
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I have some lovely brioche if you'd prefer.
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Get ready for more. If the tech bros are right and millions of people loose their jobs and healthcare, we are in for a rough couple of decades. Millions of angry people, with nothing to lose and a bunch of free time, all with one name in their heads, Sam Altman. He better start working on his robot army.
> He better start working on his robot army.
Playing catch up with Elon.
"Violence" does not only include "physical violence". It also includes "structural violence". And precisely, temperature is going up because people is sick of structural violence.
Violence is PG-13, nipples are R.
https://x.com/nxt888/status/2042498481743675804
The top comment there mentions the French Revolution.
You think people will put up with wildly accelerating inequality forever?
It’s going to explode, the only question is when.
> You think people will put up with wildly accelerating inequality forever?
No. Nor do I think they should. But UBI, higher income tax at the top and a wealth tax for the ultra rich sound like a much better plan to me than to blow a bunch of things up.
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What do you call denying healthcare?
People are coming to a logical conclusions that:
- Some if not many jobs are at risk.
- AI Psychosis is actively tearing apart families and communities, after social media and opioids have already had a pass.
- Negative social outcomes are in the service of _making money_. Not money to pay taxes to fund a healthy society, but money for the people running these systems.
Humans that lack community, safety, and purpose will embrace more drastic means of exerting control over their lives at the expense of others, no?
It is probably safe to say the temperature has been firmly up for a while. And certain subsets of the population have come to trust their Dear Leader's embrace of violence as a solution, for sure.
Jobs were already lost because of AI capital investments. None of the hyper scalers had the cash flow to support the target investment levels and had to reduce labor.
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Here's the head of research at OpenAI saying "MORE. Don't stop." to the genocide of Palestinians. He still works there.
https://x.com/QudsNen/status/1806729161840476598
There was a rumor going around Silicon Valley that if ICE came to San Francisco in force that Mark Zuckerberg's house was going to go up in flames in retaliation. You will be surprised to learn that the oligarchs talked to Trump and they did not come.
It’s a distinct minority. They’re convinced they’re the majority because everyone they talk to is in the same bubble, especially online. I saw the same thing with Mangione and Kirk and Pelosi.
Do you spend much time with people not in the tech world? I think you'd be surprised how many people hold similar sentiments, even if not to such an extreme, especially once you talk to people in the real world. I've heard far more support for this sort of thing in real life than I have online due to fear of repercussions.
Hell, even the president regularly calls for and promotes violence, so I don't think it's that much of a minority. The US was founded on it, after all.
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What I think is different today is -- regardless of how many people organically think this way -- social media is normalizing the idea. We're all being exposed to it.
It's only a minority of people who are radicalized, but it's a growing minority. Radical ideas are more accessible than ever for people to latch on to.
Radical views on violence, social relations, science, politics, distrust of institutions, etc are all way more common than they were in the 90s.
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How about the 190 school girls the US murdered in the very first attack against Iran?
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I think youre misreading it entirely, doesnt surprise me given that you're a VC.
Here's one of the posts on that thread: "I mean one thing is to use AI or even ChatGPT as a product, and another is being aware of how billionaires treat the rest of the people
As for Sam, he also has pretty controversial views for how this whole thing will pan out and how he doesn't give a shit about the consequences it might have for the rest of us. Also more recently, the whole Pentagon contract thing"
People can both use LLMs whilst having a distasteful view of the leaders of the industry.
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Nowadays, it seems common for genocidal regimes to be supported by other countries, so it looks like abhorrent violence is just part of the world order.
The temperature has definitely gone up; one could look at what the current President says and has done for reasons why people might be on edge.
“I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less,” the president responded. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They don’t want to see crime.” ... The radicals on the left are the problem. They’re vicious, and they’re horrible,” Trump said. “And they’re politically savvy, although they want men in women’s sports. They want transgender for every one. They want open borders.
“I always say, we have two enemies … We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries … We have some very bad people; we have some sick people, radical-left lunatics. And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard—or, if really necessary, by the military.”
He reguarly referred to January 6th insurrectionists as "hostages" and "patriots" then gave them all a pardon. If you breach the capitol and interrupt election processes, injure/kill police officers, and chant "hang Mike Pence" then I guess you're a patriot worthy of a pardon.
I think we're going to see a lot more of it.
The job market's shit, it's nearly impossible for young people to buy houses or pay rent, well paying jobs are disappearing to AI, inflation is sky rocketing and people are getting desperate. But then we're told the economy's doing great and billionaires like Musk and Altman are rolling in money.
Maybe because people got used to violence being used against them?
All this violence against the innocent in various places and levels, and you think it’s weird that people are fine with violence used against a billionaire conman?
I'm not saying throwing a MOlotov cocktail is ok. It's not. I think most people are analyzing the incident as being indicative of the times we're living in, particularly with the warehouse fire.
But where people are "OK with violence" is with state violence.
State violence include police violence (>1000 people are killed every year in the US by police), prison violence, violently rounding up immigrants and putting them in concentration camps, criminalizing homelessness, denying people life-saving medical care, evictions while landlords collude to raise rents, genocide, sending random people to a maximum security prison in a foreign country (ie CECOT), mass shootings, going with a firearm to a protest to instigate an incident and get a legal kill, intentionally creating the opiod crisis and so on.
For a large number of people some or all of these incidents will get a reaction somewhere between "thoughts and prayers" and "no, it's good actually".
Compare the state's reaction to one healthcare CEO being murdered and the perpetrators that are implicated in the Epstein files. Epstein himself was known to authorities since the 1990s and got an absolutely sweetheart deal in 2008.
So I'd say the real problem is what people view as violence and who's allowed to do it, seemingly without oversight or consequences of any kind most or all of the time.
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the more you push, eventually the people will snap.
uh, the president of the united states just threatened to nuke a country.
What kind of weird world are you living under...
AI company marketing is pretty overwhelmingly "we're going to take away your job and leave to you starve on the streets". People concluding that the public face of this is their enemy who must be stopped is just a really unsurprising outcome.
That is what Ilya (and many other employees) (fore)saw.
They did not want a target painted on their backs or being involved with the company responsible for mass job displacement.
Let's hope that SF doesn't turn into a free-for-all after the IPOs, since the silliest thing is for everyone to move to SF and buy up the houses and then the have-not's realise who got rich.
I'd donate that money away or give the employees (who have nothing) a one-time bonus / raise like the five-guys owner [0] to not be a target.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/27/five-guys-ce...
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This is hilarious
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We can’t vote our way towards a better future. The corrupt MAGA and DNC institutions strangle any nascent grassroots movement in the crib. And we cannot make them relinquish their death grip on our country with only bare hands.
Seriously shocked that this is the aspect of this moment in history that you choose to focus on, and not the absurd levels of violence perpetrated by the ruling classes against common people.
There is nothing scary about being genuinely OK with violence.
Thank you for considering violence against corporate totalitarianism. Please choose one of the following:
A: Violence now!
B: Maybe later.
Does causing mass poverty count as violence? Because it's kind of like violence.
I don't have a problem with violence, but I do take issue with the mass dismissal and outright hatred for AI by people who don't even understand what it is.
It absolutely has. Both the Left and the Right have seared consciences and take no issue with murder and thuggishness as long as it's "their guy" doing it to "the other guy".
The world was never a wise and virtuous man's paradise, but it has been quickly sliding into ever increasing and monstrous irrationality. Give Plato's "Republic" a read and you might find it concerning how closely we exemplify the last stages of political and social decline.
I'm sorry he, his family and his community had to deal with this, no one should have to go through this kind of thing.
I also think that he might've been able to reduce the odds of this happening by being a less awful human being.
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You mean like this article that has been making the rounds recently? The huge famous one that Altman himself called out in his post talking about the attack?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...
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Do you know him personally?
One thing I have idly wondered is how much do the ultra rich protect themselves from theft or kidnapping. Is it just not a real concern?
If Taylor Swift owns a dozen homes, does she have full time security guards at each one? Or just accept some amount of burglary may occur? Do they go everywhere with a guard? Only to public events?
It varies and they don't talk about it (obviously) but you can glean things from various sources. The more "public" the ultra rich are, the more they'll have security, especially noticeable security.
The silent or unknown ones will often still have something (usually a requirement of their or their company's insurance).
Once you graduate from "2, 3, 5 houses" to "mansions" you will have staff at each one, even if relatively bare-bones.
Yeah but theyre useless if a large organised group shows up.
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I once knew a guy that used to be head of physical security for Bill Gates. He has body guards with him all the time and a sizable security team at his home in Medina. You wouldn't believe the amount of lunatics that show up at his home unannounced and claim he promised them money (or are a relative of him somehow).
i once did a little project for the home in medina, i never went on site but i did visit the office of his property management company. Dozens of people for managing the properties and on-site staff for each as well as, i think, bgc3 but not the b&mgf.
To hear tell from my coworkers that did go on site the security was insane, the media apparatus was insane (like a dvr for every channel running 24x7 so the family could call up whatever, wherever they were at any time). This is back in like 2010ish, before the marriage blew up.
Well look they forwarded his email ten times as requested so it seems pretty clear that he does owe them money.
Once in a while we get to see concrete numbers for some of them, e.g. Meta spent $27M+ in one year on Zuck's security, which is way more than the other CEOs: https://fortune.com/2025/08/16/mark-zuckerberg-meta-security...
For a start, they have bodyguards and rarely go into public without the right protection. They also went through a huge amount putting up security and cybersecurity (like I know one who sets up so many hops between endpoints that Microsoft banned his account). Even most of their employees don't know where they are and where they plan to be, unless they choose to do so. Ofc I guess there is always a way to probe, but people who do random killing rarely has the skills/mental to do that.
> accept some amount of burglary may occur?
From https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/13/entertainment/kim-kardash...
> Kim Kardashian, testifying in the trial of the burglars accused of tying her up and robbing her at gunpoint nearly nine years ago, told a Paris court on Tuesday that she “absolutely thought” her assailants would kill her.
> “I have babies, I have to make it home, I have babies,” Kardashian recalled pleading with the armed men, who had broken into her hotel room while she slept during Paris Fashion Week in 2016.
> Facing her alleged attackers for the first time since the heist, the billionaire reality TV star detailed how she was robbed of nearly $10 million in cash and jewelry, including a $4 million engagement ring – gifted to her by her then-husband Kanye West – that was never recovered.
Putting millions of people out of work comes with consequences. We are going to see more and more of this.
Which jobs? Most of that is still AI hype.
Whether you personally believe AI has cost jobs or not is irrelevant, in the last three years companies publicly and vocally have laid hundreds of thousands of layoffs at the feet of "AI".
I agree with you, it’s mostly hype. But it doesn’t really matter whether it’s true or not because the vibes are clearly bad. These execs keep “warning” us about that AI will take all the jobs then keep pouring more money into AI, the press credulously reports it, and people are obviously worried. Most people aren’t digging through economic data themselves to figure out these execs are full of shit.
The jobs that the hype is referring to. Any lack of veracity is moot to whether or not it's convincing, else there would be no reason for it.
Capex spending to push out employees is not hype. People are getting laid off as AI spending increases is definitely real
I am by no means trying to justify anything.
Whether "the jobs" have been lost or not is irrelevant. There's something to be said of the leadership here raising a trillion dollars to do that very thing.
It's not hard to imagine an outsider taking him at face value.
If this guy says publicly, "I'm building a robot that is going to fundamentally change the economy by making most knowledge based jobs obsolete." Then proceeds to play a major role in propping up the economy on this idea.
At some point, people are going to get concerned.
Which ones? Was he the one firing people? What were the consequences for people that were?
Sf Chronicle speaks of an "alleged attack", where a Molotov Cocktail was thrown at the outer gate. Looking at the picture there was zero chance of the house catching fire.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/molotov-cocktail-c...
So the arrested suspect is either the wrong person, did not actually want to kill anyone or has no clue how fire spreads.
A strange incident that will make many people think of sending a noose to oneself (where oneself does not have to be Altman, but a pro-AI org who wants to generate sympathy).
I don't think most people in tech are quite aware of the level of visceral AI hatred amongst non-techies. I've personally witnessed the worst Thanksgiving dinnertable fight I've ever seen (after someone revealed that their recipe was AI-generated, a couple people literally spat out the food they were enjoying and threw their plates in the trash), and a divorce (a very solid marriage between two people who were once both staunchly anti-AI unraveled within weeks after one of them changed their tune and adopted AI at work).
Spitting your food out because the AI generated the recipe is so clearly irrational that I chuckled a bit on reading that
People talk about AI getting things wrong all the time, why is it "so clearly irrational" to be doubtful of a recipe that might include ingredients that can make you sick?
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I could see being concerned about food safety; I wouldn't trust an AI recipe to tell me how long/what temperature to cook chicken, and I might not trust someone who uses AI to generate recipes to know either.
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but was it done with GPT-5.4 xhigh with an adversarial loop?
First thanksgiving dinner?
I interpret it as an expression of disgust. Similar to how people will stop reading and throw away a good book when they learn the author is a morally reprehensible person.
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Really? I can think of a few reasons I wouldn't trust AI-generated recipes.
The very fact that your takeaway from that story was "look at how dumb my enemies are" is why this is a conflict worth worrying about.
Are you right? Yeah, basically. Are you going to laugh at your stupid neighbors until they burn your house down in rage? Maybe? You don't treat fear with malice.
lol = if you're against AI recipes, you have bigger problems.
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I mostly agree that it's an overreaction. However, "irrational" is a really bad choice of word. Every non-technical person understands that sometimes AI says wrong things - like, random, crazy wrong things, not just a little off. It's just a general rule kept in the back of the mind. Food is easily in that realm of "be careful". Did the AI produce a recipe that would be harmful to you and the cook didn't notice? Almost certainly not. So, sure, they were being over-cautious. But "irrational"? No, no, no. It's definitely rational.
Look at what you're writing.
"Doing X is so clearly irrational that I chuckled a bit."
Please don't perpetuate the image of the elitist techie. That is what was just firebombed.
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Well, Sam Altman and Jensen Huang are going around bragging about how many people they're going to push out of employment. Might have something to do with it.
> going around bragging about how many people they're going to push out of employment.
When have they bragged about this?
This.
Sam's got 3 billion net worth.
Jensen's got 165 billion to his name.
They are giddy about taking jobs away, and both are engaged in "tax reduction strategies" and suck up to Donald Trump.
You wonder why people are pissed?
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I operate in at least one social circle that is heavily not-technical (local politics) and I do not see this at all.
My experience is somewhat in the middle -- I see educated non-technical people who are strongly against AI because they see it as polluting, "wasting water", and harmful to society. Although many use it anyway.
I could totally believe uneducated or less well-adjusted people reacting in the above way, though.
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The hatred is particularly intense on reddit. I lost a couple of accounts there to suspension, just for speaking a civil way about the positive aspects of AI.
What do you see?
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People in politics aren't that dissimilar to tech bros (especially AI ones) in terms of world view.
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My wife runs a food blog and sometimes uses AI to come up with recipes she tests on us first. One of the best dishes she’s ever made (and one of the best I’ve ever eaten) was pork with an apricot sauce. The pork was fine, but the sauce was absolutely incredible! I’d put it on any kind of meat. Funny thing is, I don’t even like apricots, but the sauce was amazing. My wife does have one advantage, which is that she knows when the AI has hallucinated something crazy and makes appropriate adjustments. I guess it's like anything. AI can be a big help to those who already have a threshold level of background knowledge in a field but can cause big problems for those who don't.
You can’t write something like this and not share the recipe.
From a recent NBC News poll, “the only topics that were less popular than AI were the Democratic Party and Iran”: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-majority...
There is very strong anti-AI sentiment among "techies" too. It's just not absolute or generalized (AI is a huge umbrella term).
You might call me a "techie" and I both use AI and have very strong anti-AI sentiment. I don't think this is a contradiction, because I believe while the technology itself is not bad, the way that people use it definitely is.
People trust AI outputs in ways they should not. They don't understand its sycophantic design and succumb to AI psychosis. They deploy it in antisocial ways, for war, or spam, or scams. They use it to justify layoffs. They use it as a justification to gobble up public funds. They use it to power their winner-take-all late-stage capitalism economy. It goes on and on.
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Politics really is a substitute for religion in America
In secular America at least. Most people in the US are religious, many of them fervently so.
And quite a few of them like to mix their religion with politics.
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Religious people can be anti-AI too.
Indeed, but the rage I've seen during political fights at family gatherings (and another politics-induced divorce) pales in comparison to the rage I saw in these two anecdotes. The worst political debates I've seen involved raised voices and some name calling, not spitting food and smashing plates. The only other political divorce I've seen slowly simmered over a few years after Trump was first elected, not in a literal matter of weeks.
America has no lack of religion.
I must live in the upside down. If there are any ardent anti-AI people I come across they're techies. Whereas non-techies are either oblivious or completely and comically locked-in as caricatured in that South Park episode.
The remarkable part of your anecdote is the behavior. Seems to me some humans nowadays are less tolerant of any difference in opinion, AI is just the current reason to pick a fight.
Wonder why that is, and if we'll grow out of it peacefully.
It’ll quiet down once we make it illegal and/or justification to be committed to an asylum to have opinions we don’t like - the way it was in the old, tolerant days.
Nowadays? It's always been the case, the only thing that changed is the subject.
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This was obviously a fictional thanksgiving dinner. Nobody is this geezed up about AI assistance.
Nobody in your circle of friends/acquaintances perhaps.
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I would absolutely stop eating a meal if I learned AI was involved in creating it. I suppose I wouldn't literally spit it out but I wouldn't take another bite.
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It's quite prevalent in tech too-- however, folks tend to be quiet because the "use AI for everything or else" hammer is being used across the industry.
Not just non-techies. Plenty of techies share that same visceral hatred. Some of them even use these tools themselves, because it’s a complicated issue with nuances.
Yep, all of us with a clue are keeping our traps shut at work, or even boosting it or slapping it onto projects that don't need it, because this is clearly one of those things where attempting to offer counsel and advice that's contrary to the way the MBA winds are blowing can only hurt your career.
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From my own perspective, the "visceral hatred" isn't so much at AI (which I use almost exclusively to generate funny pictures of myself and coworkers) but at the executives that view it as a way to enshittify society.
turning myself (an overweight bearded guy) into an animated hula dancer and turning my coworker into the Terminator and sinking into molten steel don't seem to inspire the same hatred. unless you don't like hula dancers.
Anecdotal. I can't stand generative AI. I wouldn't mind if a friend used stable diffusion to make a pic of their D&D character. I would be very mad if Wizards of the Coast used AI instead of artists in their next source book.
Nothing has made me lose hope in the masses more than seeing how much bile is being spewed over a net positive innovation. People will hate AI first after others tell them to, then try to come up with illogical (and often hypocritical) reasoning afterwards to try and justify their prejudice.
I don't think most people in tech are quite aware of the level of visceral AI hatred amongst non-techies.
I work in a non-tech industry and I see this all the time from people, but it's not just limited to AI. SV itself evokes hatred in a lot of people on both sides of the spectrum.
I can't repeat the worst things I've heard, but Altman and his ilk should be terrified of the mob violence they're instigating.
Ironically I have noticed it's techies and white collar workers who fear and/or loathe AI the most. Why? Cause they're the most likely whose jobs have been threatened by it or have already been superseded by it.
My blue collar work buddies don't feel as strongly or as existential about it. To them, it's just this buzzwordy crap that has ruined entertainment or made the quality of services even worse. It's more of an annoyance than an outright fear and/or loathing of it.
Maybe if the bubble pops and the economy tanks and it affects their bottom line they might hate it as much as the aforementioned people.
I think techies and white collar workers are more likely to see what is coming with AI.
Example: in the very best case, every call center worker will be replaced with a chatbot. Service quality will be worse. Any situation out of the norm will be way more frustrating. It will be buggy. It will get into loops. And there will be no human contact to break the cycle.
I think that's the dynamic that worries people the most - their bank, their landlord, maybe even their 911 service all replaced with something that is even less responsive and even less accountable.
If they divorced in few weeks, there is zero chance it was solid before ai disagreement. They were distancing themselves emotionally long before.
Portland?
That is really funny.
The only thing we hear is your jobs are going to be gone but we are still only giving you healthcare if you work.
Most SV people live in a bubble inside of a bubble. They don’t understand how their words come across to a significant portion of the population. If they did they would shut the fuck up.
Not sure why you were downvoted so heavily. SV is a bubble if I've seen one.
Silicon Valley just means a concentration of influential and powerful actors including venture capitalists, executives, entrepreneurs who decide the fate of the technology industry. Basically the elites of the XYZ sector.
Same can be applied for DC (politics/military), NY (finance), LA (entertainment).
SV was around since the 60-90s but didn't get much attention until beginning of this millenium due to the huge value creation and control they had over the US economy. They just happen to be relevant in recent times. 100s of years ago it was the railroad and oil conglomerates, 1000s of years ago kings and feudal lords. So there is always a powerful influential class who controls the strings -- its a feature of human society.
Surely there must have been underlying tensions in that marriage.
(I don't feel at all confident in that statement; I am requesting reassurance.)
They are pretty good friends of mine and I never sensed any tension. It really was a marriage-ending bolt out of the blue, like discovering an affair or severe financial infidelity.
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I've found that most non-tech people are indifferent or, at worst, utterly bored by any mention of AI.
The tech people are the ones that have the strongest opinions one way or the other.
That is my experience, as well.
TBH people in AI may also resent AI, because they are the first to be impacted by AI. They just don't say openly because frankly no one wants to lose his/her job.
I think you're just in a strange bubble of people because those are absolutely comical responses to learning of AI. I do know some people who are for or anti AI to a stronger extent, but most of those I know simply don't give a shit, they'll use AI if it's there, such as for their job or to ask an LLM questions, but otherwise not think about it.
wow people really are getting psychosis from AI (discourse)
Crypto doesn't get that much hatred, since you don't need to participate in the space even in non-techies circles. But it doesn't affect them and it can be safely ignored in its own bubble.
Mentioning "AI" in non-techies circles is a bad idea. It tells you that many here are in a massive bubble and unaware of the visceral hate against AI because it directly affects them and they cannot opt-out.
Given that AI takes more than it gives back (jobs, energy, water, houses) of course you will get anti-AI activists.
Except when you’re the victim of ransomware that extorts you to pay some bitcoin. But it seems that fewer people have encountered that than having AI forced upon them.
Purely American phenomenon, most of the world is pro ai
> a couple people literally spat out the food they were enjoying and threw their plates in the trash
That was an unnecessarily extreme reaction, like AI 3d printed the ingredients.
> after someone revealed that their recipe was AI-generated, a couple people literally spat out the food they were enjoying and threw their plates in the trash
Not entirely unwarranted given the track record of LLMs as a chef though:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/10/pak-n-save-sav...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o
Of course it was two years ago and it's unlikely to happen again, but that's the drawback of the “move fast and break things” attitude: sometimes you've broken public perception and it's hard to fix afterwards.
Hmm, that's troubling but predictable.
The idea that AI will bring an age of abundance may be true, but not in the short term. Companies are letting people go, and AI will be blamed for that, whether true or not. For decades the public perception that most Tech Bros have prioritized profits over the wellbeing of the little guy is well established, in my view, in some cases well deserved with no accountability.
It's looking like AI will generate a modern version of the early 1800s Luddite Rebellion where British textile workers destroyed machines that displaced jobs, prioritizing factory owners' profits over workers. They targeted technology and industrialists.
Tech Bros can avoid this by modifying their priorities, prioritize employee rights and lobbying governments to begin implementing some sort of Universal Basic Income of some sort and or provide the means by which people can survive, or the government may start marketing Soylent Green to consumers :(
I'd say an important distinction is AI is currently threatening to displace a significantly larger number of jobs across multiple sectors. Whether it can/will actually happen is yet to be seen, but the potential amount of scorned people with nothing to lose is far greater this time.
I agree. It's hard to know, but if it were me that's creating this type of economy, an uncertain economy which may/may not bring about all these changes, I'd modify the approach to account for any potential human displacement, just in case it does come about.
The outlook from my view, though limited, is so pessimistic that I just keep thinking about a scenario similar to, though not AI-related, Soylent Green or Great Ravine from The Dark Forest, Volume 2 of Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy (aka The Three-Body Problem series).
I keep hoping I come across a 1973 Ford Falcon XB GT Coupe aka "V8 Interceptor" or "Pursuit Special," when all hell breaks loose :|
> It's looking like AI will generate a modern version of the early 1800s Luddite Rebellion where British textile workers destroyed machines that displaced jobs, prioritizing factory owners' profits over workers. They targeted technology and industrialists.
It's worth remembering that the way that ended was extremely bloody, particularly for the Luddites themselves. There were a handful of extreme participants, there was a murder, and there was a hell of a lot of violence directed at anyone perceived as a Luddite— even though most actual Luddites themselves mostly avoided violence against other humans.
It would be good if we can somehow avoid such outcomes this time.
Greed drives most of the current crop of Tech Bros.
I once had the chance to be a Bro, far richer than any of the current ones, thanks to the still secretive and anonymous "original-sn-adjacent cryptographic collective". Things, however, did not work out in my favor thanks to other nefarious third-party actors. So, I know where from I speak.
Any outcome is in the hands of the Tech Bros but by the looks of it, greed drives their every action, so things are not looking good!
:(
I'm a neo-luddite
This will only get worse imo - regardless of how Sam is perceived - there is anger against AI which is growing amongst the people. I think we as a society need to stop and have the conversation and be more thoughtful about how we integrate AI with everything.
More thoughtful? How about we don't integrate AI with everything as we seem to be polluting and burning down the planet just to keep AI running. There's also the rampant copyright infringing just to train the models, so I think we need to figure out how to correctly punish the AI executives first for breaking laws on such a large scale.
I don't think this is possible yet, because many people refuse to think AI would be eventually better than us at practically anything (at least anything virtual), they keep talking about what's "current" while I think it's completely irrelevant for that discussion, people need to assume extreme intelligence and orchestration tools (and robots) will be there, worldwide, it's a *fact*, not just a maybe.
It is actually entirely possible to discuss a solution for something that may or may not happen. If a hurricane is approaching, we don't typically require every person to agree the odds of landfall are 100% to start preparing shelters and stockpiling aid nearby. Not everything in the world is about the "AI skeptics" on the internet being dumb and wrong unlike you.
Your "fact" is pure vaporware and hallucination.
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Effective and plentiful assassin drones are part of our future.
Slaughterbots (2017)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA
Think occupy Wall Street but cranked up significantly.
That’s what’s coming. Like it or not.
I hope "cranked up" was a pun
No surprise given that a full quarter of these on one side of the political spectrum consider political violence acceptable (~25%. Same figure is 9% for self-identified moderates, 3% for the other side).
Source: https://rb.gy/wdzmsc (YouGov poll, n=2,646, date = sep 10, 2025, question = "Do you think it is ever justified for citizens to resort to violence in order to achieve political goals? (%)", raw data linked under poll graph, downloadable )
“ever”? So we’re not limited to reality or likely scenarios? Just anything I make up as if I was writing a creative fiction novel?
I’m not sure how much this question actually measures propensity towards violence, than it does creativity and imagination.
Yes political violence is NEVER justifiable. That is the one and only correct answer if you wish to live in a modern society. And believe me, you do not want to live in the other kind
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It's clear that there is a huge bias depending on how the question is phrased. All those conservatives who say that political violence is unacceptable would answer differently if it's phrased in terms relative to the second amendment.
One just needs to observe current events to understand that a large portion of ahem "the other side" either fail to understand what "political violence" is, or are simply lying about whether it can ever be justified.
It's currently in vogue for "the other side" to decry political violence; of course they will say it is not justified in a 2025 poll. The only problem is that it is blatantly contradicted by the political violence which is perpetrated and excused by "the other side".
"Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento!"
"Look behind you! Remember that you are a man."
how to tell its not AI or AGI..it throws a Molotov cocktail...
Yeah, Unitrees wouldn't aim that good.
When you constantly preach on how your company is able to save money by taking away jobs, I have no fucking sympathy for you.
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Anti-Semitism is socialism for idiots. Take your nazi shit elsewhere.
My first thought was false flag. Is that too cynical?
I would go for out of touch, not cynical. A lot of people really think AI is the devil.
It will be hard to convince them otherwise when their jobs are replaced with AI, and they are in their late 40s or later - with no time to adjust and to learn new craft.
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Possible, but unlikely. To organise such a stunt and keep undetected you're going to need other consigliere than what Sam's got I presume.
Like another commenter wrote... anyone can cast a fireball. Sam has been called a sociopath by many who know him personally. So it seems more likely than it might be otherwise.
Nope. So was mine.
It kind of fits with the behavior he exhibited as reported by Farrow in New Yorker article.
I’m surprised we haven’t heard more direct action incidents - there is no way the shameless behavior of our high profile oligarchs is not ruffling a few feathers too much.
Maybe they are just not reporting near misses
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Definitely deplorable. If he is as many claim him to be, and the info about pushing hard to control the narrative recently is accurate, the timing certainly is suspect. But part of the point of a false flag is to make it hard to discuss whether it is a false flag, and ideally to see that it is never determined one way or another.
It’s plausible but gosh, I certainly hope not. That is such a sad world to live in.
It certainly is a highly convenient timing just before the Musk lawsuit against OpenAI.
Only minor damage was caused to a metal gate far from the building. Yet people here speak of "bombing Altman". So the sympathy works, and might work on the jury in that trial as well.
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false flag? for sympathy, especially with the hit piece after hit piece on him
I've been saying for years on here...
to the people on HN who are against blockchain but bullish on AI
With blockchain and smart contracts or stupid even memecoins, you can only lose what you voluntarily put in. You had to jump through a few hoops, then maybe you got rugpulled, maybe you became a millionaire.
With AI, regardless of whether you consented or not, you can lose your job, gradually your relationships and sense of purpose. And if some malicious actors want to weaponize it against you, you can lose your reputation, your freedom, get hacked at scale, and much more. The sooner we give biolabs to everyone the sooner someone can create an advanced persistent threat virus online infecting every openclaw machine, or a designer virus with an incubation period of half a year.
And I know what someone on here will always say. There will always be a comment to the effect of "this has always existed, AI is nothing new". But quantity has a quality all its own. Enjoy your AI slop internet dark forest. Until you don't.
Is your definition of bullish "believes the technology will be widely adopted across society and accrue significant wealth to its owners?" - if so, I think it's very clear how someone could be bullish on AI and not blockchain. You don't have to like AI to see it as an inexorable transformer (ha!) of society and wealth.
Is your definition of bullish "believes the technology is a major net good for society?" - if so, you're comparing two technologies with significant social aspirations that come from very different philosophical backgrounds. While both are techno-optimist, Blockchain is a fundamentally libertarian technology, while generative AI comes from a more utilitarian, capital-focused background. People who value individual freedom above all else will get excited about blockchain and feel mixed-to-negative about AI, while people who want to elevate the overall capability of the human race to the exclusion of anything else will get excited by AI and see blockchain as a parlor trick.
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Joe Biden's recommendation to Sam (and all of us):"Buy a Shotgun":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-mztxHgYQo
Joe sings great harmony in this video by the way!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47722344 - feel free to delete/merge that thread with this one
You should link to the actual source and include the archive link as the post text or as a top-level comment. The domain displayed next to the link will otherwise be the archive domain, which does not inform readers about the source.
Also, @mentions are not implemented on HN; email hn@ycombinator.com to get mod attention. (And you can confirm with them what I wrote about archive links.)
The link goes to a dead post (because archive - but there's nothing to merge), you're posting to an account that has posted/failed with archive links before and used @ before.. not sure what you're hoping for here.
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The problem here is that there are no viable solutions to what happens when AI eventually replaces (yes replaces) tens of millions of humans in white collar roles.
All that is being "promised" are vague claims of "abundance". But all I see is this:
"AGI" is going to bring abundance of lots of very angry people and UBI to no-one (because it can never work at a large sustainable scale).
Some people are starting to realise that "AGI" was a grift and a scam and they are not happy about this lie and the insiders knew that and increased spending on security and private bodyguards.
I don't think the LLM will produce AGI. Just based on how context windows work, the prompt cycle, etc. LLMs aren't out there thinking about stuff in their spare time. The way they appear to have thoughts and a psyche is purely an illusion.
Something I often think about is how we can barely define what AGI, consciousness, etc are. We may be pretty sure that what we have currently is an illusion, but at which point is the illusion good enough that it no longer matters? Especially with regards to my first question.
It's hard to say it's not X when we can't really define X.
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It doesn't have to produce AGI and it could still ruin the lives of millions of people. Our society isn't ready for that kind of shock. We can't all be instagram influencers.
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> LLMs aren't out there thinking about stuff in their spare time.
Agentic changes the calculus.
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Ministry of the Future beat you to the punch with victims of human driven climate change shooting down thousands of private planes with drones as protest.
One of the biggest fantasies in that book is that the "protesters" would be so unified and ethical in their plots.
In real life the attacks in response to climate change(and in this case, economic injustice), will be committed by such an uncountable plurality of groups that the violence will seem almost capricious.
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On something like... attack drones targeting the ultra wealthy? I (and probably the FBI) would love to see your pitch deck.
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Neither statement is an incitement to violence. Charles Koch's support for an open borders policy is on the public record; there's no conspiracy nor assertion of conspiracy: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-case...
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AI is unstoppable as the algorithmic changes are at least as fast as compute improvements. One proof of it is that even older GPUs' value is going up.
What exactly does that mean?
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> face of AI amongst low-information luddites
This is condescending and unfair. Altman, OpenAI, and the media have spent years making Altman the face of AI. His company has (by far) the largest market cap, does the most deals, and has the most users.
I suspect Anthropic/Claude will become as much of a household name as ChatGPT, but it's not even close yet. ChatGPT is almost a generic term for AI chatbots at the moment.
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An impostor is an impostor, no matter what the media makes them. Tbh, it's ok that the plates brake into his head since he has done so many bad things previously, he deserves it.
We can only hope that when they reveal the identity of this guy he happens to have a name that overlaps the mario bros. universe.
I bet the molotov cocktail was made via instructions from ChatGPT.
Wonder if it has anything to do with the New Yorker article...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659135 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...
It seems Sam Altman has the same suspicion, based upon his response:
> There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago. Someone said to me yesterday they thought it was coming at a time of great anxiety about AI and that it made things more dangerous for me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47724921
Unlikely – no one is starting off undecided, then reading one article in The New Yorker and then committing this. And it's a slippery slope to tie it to legitimate criticism.
Trigger warning: AI animation of uncanny-valley Sam Altman "hydra"
I guess this is what we get when the media and politicians go all in with their AI populist hate. I don't think I've seen a positive AI headline outside of the tech press, and even then they are pretty thin. Abundance and growing the pie for everyone is also an outcome if this is done right.
> Abundance and growing the pie for everyone is also an outcome if this is done right.
That’s like saying we don’t need minimum wage or unions because companies choosing to treat workers with respect is also a possible outcome. It’s technically true but once you go from “is this theoretically possible?” to “is this likely?” it becomes obvious that the answer is no. Most of the big AI backers are openly salivating at destroying millions of jobs, and they’re already evading taxes now so they’re not going to be funding UBI willingly — and if you have any doubt, look at where their political spending goes, consistently to the people who are doing their best to remove what small taxes they’re still paying and declaring war on the concept of regulated markets.
> Abundance and growing the pie for everyone is also an outcome if this is done right.
Do you genuinely believe there's any chance that's going to happen?
Looking at the last few hundred years of our civilization, absolutely!
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I do, because the alternative is unthinkable.
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or, here me out, people are just sick of it? They don't care that their masters are sniffing eachothers ai powered farts to keep the economy afloat on the promise of their obsolescence. Sure, in theory it could be good for them, they can get more work done quickly, but why would they be kept alive if their owners no longer need to rely on them. The ideal business has no expenses, workers are one of those. Combine that with everything being shit nowadays, yeah, I can't blame whoever did this
I think the media and politicians are reflecting popular sentiment, not the other way around.
Was social media "done right"?