Comment by teekert
4 hours ago
So what is he supposed to say? "Ok let's stop developing AI so you can all have the exact job you trained for?" That hasn't been the case for decades.
When I left my eduction I could sequence 200 basepairs using gels. Now I process terabytes of NGS data on supercomputers. I dealt with it, I enjoyed it.
Edit: Not saying these kids have nothing to rage against, they can't afford houses, are uninsured, they face a huge wealth gap in the population, possible a war, the country is tearing apart... But why so anti AI specifically?
> But why so anti AI specfically?
Because society is structured so that every time some labor-saving innovation comes along, it's used as a tool to drive down wages and reduce workers' bargaining power. And they leaders of these industries aren't exactly hiding it.
You might be able to game it in the short term, but It's not like anyone is seriously thinking this will reduce the totality of our efforts in the long term. Employers are already champing at the bit to reduce headcount and increase output targets.
The only hope these people have to offer in their bleak future is that if you play your cards right, you might be one of the few crabs to climb over the other crabs and escape the bucket before it's dumped into the kettle. It's giving "we need one person from each department to stay on and train the India team after the layoffs" vibes.
Yep. In theory, labor saving innovation (or handing jobs off overseas) should be a joyous occasional all. It could be a joyous occasion for all. But we have structured it so that, the moment it happens, 200% of the benefits go to capital and -100% go to labor -- and the consolation prize for labor is that maybe some of the 200% will trickle down into a different job later, or willingness to spend on overpriced haircuts, or something.
There's an argument to be made that this is a necessary component of an economy that can reinvent itself. Maybe. But even if we accept this convenient and self-serving and suspicious premise, there can then be no concession on the point that structuring it this way creates an obligation on the part of the person receiving 200% to "spread it around" and that attempts to dodge this obligation are morally repugnant, socially unacceptable, and ought to be met with harsh political backpressure.
For the last while, that hasn't been the thinking. Instead we have gone for "blame mexicans and let's see if we can't make it 300%!" The response of the kids gives me hope that people might be coming back to their senses on the matter.
There's an argument to be made that this is just part of a repeating cycle of history. Powerful people have always, will always, and are currently using their power to make themselves more powerful - no matter whether the power takes the form of nobility titles, currency, or company directorships. History consists of a continuous gradual increase in "top 1% wealth" punctuated by sharp decreases.
I agree, this is a reason to boo the (tech) elites. But they seem to boo genAI specifically, right? I'd understand it if they'd just started booing right from the first word.
Somehow, wages tend to go up, though:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Nice try, now use a deflator that doesn't systematically understate housing and forced substitution.
Innovation can make specific skills obsolete; but only if the output of the process actually gets cheaper or better...
It results in the output becoming available to people at a lower price point.
It's not some artificial social system like unions guilds or cartels, it's a tangible thing that actually produces more output with less (or different) workers.
If the tech CEO dream that they are selling that LLMs replace all white collar work within a few years who is going to have money to buy anything at the lower price point?
>so you can all have the exact job you trained for
Couldn't be any more ironic than being delivered at a graduation ceremony. An equal message could be:
"You know all that time, effort and money you just spent learning something over the last few years? It's useless now. Lamo. Congrats on wasting your life."
To your edit, it's because the commencement speakers are praising AI and probably not praising the Iran war, the wealth gap, or high housing prices. I would imagine if a commencement speaker did praise those things they would get boo-ed too.
>But why so anti AI specifically
I think maybe AI is just the last straw for many people. If capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production, AI represents the ultimate dream of the capitalist: the elimination of the need of human labor entirely. Whether or not it can achieve that is secondary to the goal itself.
Grads are facing a brutal job market where much of what they just spent several years of their lives learning is going to have little to no value to employers. It's not like your gradual transition from sequencing with gels to using supercomputers over the long course of a career.
It's like you just spent 4 years learning to sequence with gels, and now someone is telling you that was a waste of time, and you should just stop complaining and deal with it.
> It's not like your gradual transition from sequencing with gels to using supercomputers over the long course of a career.
this. I don't understand why people here are pretending like its not a big deal.
But aren't we all going through this? I'm going through it, sadly I'm lacking the plasticity of a young mind!
I know I'm being privileged, but not by much, I'm self employed and the world is changing like crazy and it scares me as well, how will I gather my income in a year (luckily I do live in a "socialist" country, but not so socialist for entrepreneurs)? No idea, but I set up Open Claw and Claude Code and it's opening my eyes to different ways of doing things. The primitives to do this are the same as always (Linux). Sure, if you're doing medicine you won't know how to do this, but you never did, you relied on people like me/us.
Well, perhaps the only difference between me and the younglings is that over time I've come to trust my intellect. I'll deal with it, as they say.
Btw, if you're really suggesting that "this time it's different" (as in AI is different from electricity, the internet, ubiquitous computing), then you agree with the elites: you're going to have to deal with it, the genie is out of the box and it happened faster than ever.
I'll add again, they the younglings have many reason to boo the tech elites, and I'd join them if I were there, I'm just trying to understand what is exactly going on in the minds of our precious new generation, this is important (Hey, I watched Altered Carbon!).
1 reply →
You're right. Ali Alkhatib believes that AI is a political project intended to shift power and agency away from individuals and organizations and toward centralized power structures. Now, ordinary people must figure out a way forward, because they have fewer and fewer cards to play.
> AI represents the ultimate dream of the capitalist: the elimination of the need of human labor entirely
Decreasing human toil for the same level of production should be the dream of _everyone_. If it's only capitalists in favor then that's a massive indictment of the non-capitalists.
This reminds me of the famous Bastiat quote: "If, then, the utility of any branch of industry is to be estimated not by the amount of satisfactions it is fitted to procure us with a determinate amount of labour, but, on the contrary, by the amount of labour which it exacts in order to yield us a determinate amount of satisfactions, what we ought evidently to desire is, that each acre of land should yield less corn, and each grain of corn less nourishment…"
The misunderstanding that labor and not production is the basis of prosperity leads to some pretty silly conclusions.
Production is only good for me if I get to consume it.
Do you seriously don't understand why?
Do you seriously think everybody is a programmer now that we have AI? Or that we don't need programmers anymore?
The tools are just changing. But everything is always changing.
Again: Sure they have much to boo about, but AI? Gen AI can run on your own machine even, you can fully own the means to your production. How is this wasting the time they spent studying? You still need knowledge and understanding of a field to be active in it. When the tools change your internal "world model" is not suddenly corrupt. I hope these kids were taught how to think, not what to think.
Kids fresh out of college with crippling student debt and no jobs should just buy increasingly expensive GPUs capable of running the best local models. Well done, problem solved.
Because the manager/owner/techbro class has decided we don't need employees for anything anymore, AI can do it all. This is phenomenally untrue, but that doesn't help you pay off your $400K of student loans or buy a house.
If I hear that "AI is just a tool" nonsense one more time...
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You are missing the point of why AI is being hated so much. Sequencing was just a tool for you that made your job easier. Right now it almost feels like CEOs can't wait to use AI to fire everyone
It helps that research assignments have a certain amount of people-power available, to which amplifiers increase the work done. Many businesses have a certain amount of work to be done, so amplifiers reduce the people needed.
That's not even accounting for AI's unique ability to trick CEOs.
> But why so anti AI specifically?
because they just spent $200k on an education that this man is telling them is worthless now, and how that's a good thing for them.
Maybe these "thought leaders" should be showing the kids unsure about their future a path forward instead of just spouting the AI hype.
> But why so anti AI specifically?
also, because one college did it and got famous on the internet , and now all the kids want in on it.
>So what is he supposed to say?
How to deal with it. Spitting "deal with it" at the audience just says he was so unprepared that he didn't even realize he was literally hired to give them that send-off guidance. But being skilled and notable in a field doesn't make people insightful.
Because people like Eric Schmidt are constantly talking about how AI is going to make the careers they just spent 6 figures learning to do obsolete.
How delusional do you have to be to give a pro-AI speech to the generation most likely to be directly fucked over by AI if your other predictions are true?
we could just ban so-called AI "music"
nothing bad would happen, no one would lose anything
It's a college graduation speech, he's not required to touch on any specific topics.
"AI is going to upend your nascent adulthood and career" is pretty tone-deaf when delivered by a semi-retired billionaire who was was neck-deep in a conspiracy to reduce wages in his industry barely 20 years ago.
He can shut up?