Comment by bbor
4 hours ago
Sure, CEOs are rarely appreciated in general. But the anti-tech sentiment is absolutely a new and rapidly growing beast. It’s different — trust me.
4 hours ago
Sure, CEOs are rarely appreciated in general. But the anti-tech sentiment is absolutely a new and rapidly growing beast. It’s different — trust me.
A lot of tech recently has just made things worse.
Uber made the taxi experience way worse and less predictable.
Now, I can’t just walk out of a bar, get into a clean taxi and go home, I have to fiddle with an app, wait, wave trying to identify “my” ride, then hope it’s clean and safe. It’s a nightmare compared to what we had before.
Uber eats made food delivery significantly worse and more expensive.
It used to be that I could get food delivered for a known fixed price, it would arrive while still hot and it would be delivered to the door. Now, the price is obfuscated, there’s an extra fee for getting the food warm, sometimes the drinks are spilled into the bag, delivery is to the curb so I have to go outside to get it.
There’s a lot more that has been made worse by tech companies.
I agree wholeheartedly with your first sentence here. But I find it difficult to think of a worse example you could have picked than taxis. For all Uber's many faults, the taxi companies were worse. Hell they're still worse.
Are you old enough to remember the bad old days?
Whilst you can argue that services may have improved in some respects, the action towards resolution to problems is carefully monitored to help as least as possible and insulate accountability within a blanket of 'help' agents.
1 reply →
TV has unskippable and targeted commercials now. The list goes on and on.
My experience with Uber is the opposite, FWIW.
It's just Neo Luddite stuff... we don't have to accept the current status quo. Good lord I'd love it if all my needs were met by the abundance of the planet and I could spend my days working on projects I liked and exploring.
Why can't anyone see beyond their job?
Magical wishful thinking is as misguided as even the most rabid anti-tech critique.
Your - piloto_ciego - needs will never be met by the abundance of the planet. Perhaps your great great great grandchildren may begin to live in such a free way, but you and everyone else alive now will not. There are too many people on the planet, wealth is too unevenly distributed, food production is too unevenly distributed, water is too unevenly distributed, energy production is too unevenly distributed; the only way anyone can get their needs met is by participating in an economy which can allocate and relocate those scarce resources.
All AI is doing is taking an increasingly large share of those resources in pursuit of ensuring the survival of an ouroboros of circular funding between a tiny number of companies to the detriment of everyone else attempting to participate in that economy.
AI may or may not prove to be a significant step on the ladder to the ultimate end of scarcity, but there is no possible way that anyone you could conceivably meet, much less be, will ever experience the kind of life liberated from toil that you wish for.
Electricity promised to eliminate toil and bring us a life of leisure. It did not. Perhaps all technologies have this potential, AI included. That potential will never be realized because relentless and perpetual growth is a necessary precondition and justification for the development and expansion of such technologies, and that growth demands and consumes whatever excess human capacity that the technology freed up.
The best you can hope for is to exploit the technology selfishly, carving out a life of scholarly pursuit and passion projects while rent-seeking on top of the economic work of humans who couldn't get there as fast as you. But that has been an option since the invention of money.
Dude, I'm building an off grid cabin in the woods. I already live pretty "freely." Dream bigger. We can change and make the world awesome! We have to want to though.
> Electricity promised to eliminate toil and bring us a life of leisure. It did not. Perhaps all technologies have this potential, AI included. That potential will never be realized because relentless and perpetual growth is a necessary precondition and justification for the development and expansion of such technologies, and that growth demands and consumes whatever excess human capacity that the technology freed up.
Also, this speaks to me as someone who has never used used a screw driver to turn a screw into a board. The drill driver has made it amazingly better.
EDIT to add:
Also, I've lived a subsistence lifestyle before, I'm fairly close to doing it again though I'll still need some money to roll through the household? Dream bigger buddy. It's not all doom and gloom.
It's not the no job part that troubles them, it's the question of where basic levels of food, clothing, shelter are going to come from, and the means to have objects of desire and the freedom to travel.
Maybe you can't see that, but for a good many people hovering about the knife edge of just getting by such things are a pressing concern.
Perhaps in future Halcyon days when all needs are met joy will be had by all .. right now there's a looming gap of uncertainty for many.
Well, those are political decisions, and WE (not the nebulous "they") are who make those decisions.
Like, I lost literally everything when I got sick. I think I probably understand "hovering about the knife edge" better than most people on this site. I lost my career, my sense of identity, and more than most can imagine. When you have faced explaining to your son how you might not make it through treatment and how he'll be responsible for a lot of things I am responsible for going forward, you kind of look at these people whining about AI codegen and sigh. This freaking technological miracle that might make their jobs obsolete so they're afraid of it, those people are as children who cannot see that it could literally free them from stupid bullshit... You people are not your jobs, you're not your salary and your job at ServiceNow or SalesForce or whatever can never love you back. The robot isn't a threat to you, the system that values the robot more than you is. It's basic root cause analysis.
But I bounced back. I fought through it. I kept on slogging through the stress and catastrophe. This whole thing feels like the meme to me, "oh, fist time?"
You know what I learned though? That we are not always powerless to act. We can get up and go. We can create! We can just do stuff. People need to realize that they have agency! Your life can get better if you get to continue it (hopefully). You are allowed to live how you want to live, you can do things! You don't have to accept being fed dog shit every day. How many of these people bitching and moaning about AI have even thought to try to form a union? How many of these people vote? How many of these people get off their assess and go and participate in some direct action? How many?
Dammit, why don't I see anyone in the street protesting the war? Why don't I see anyone protesting the lack of social safety nets? Why don't I see anyone doing anything. You know why? Because doing things is hard. Because most people want things to change without putting in any of the work (sometimes dangerous, sometimes stressful) to change things. And meanwhile, I see AI - which could literally be a tool we use to fix the injustices of the world, the disaster of tying people's right to exist to their pay check - that NONSENSE that we mostly all hate, and the response is "oh my god what if it takes my job?" or so-called "leftists" bending over backwards to defend copyright law.
These people complaining don't want the system to change, they just want to maintain a privileged position within it. But if the system has always been harming people at the margins, is it ok if we go back? "Oh, thank goodness we made AI illegal so I can still have to fill out my manual TPS reports and report to Bob on my progress for the week! How great is that!" The lack of imagination of a better world is astounding and disheartening. The whiners and perpetual malcontents shouting about AI secretly want to be the billionaire, not overthrow a system that allows them in the first place. They want their previously privileged status as a "knowledge worker" to remain special.
Man, am I the only one in here who read Marx? Bell Hooks? Kropotkin? Dream bigger people!
The pace of growth of hatred is new (thanks to AI, mostly), but it's been sitting at a simmer for 20 years.
It's a crisis of trust, on that point I do find myself agreeing with Dario. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323245
edit: There are solutions to this. See link.
Whenever somebody qualifies a statement with "trust me", my first inclination and deepest instinct is to ignore that statement. Saying it doesn't make you more believable or authoritative on... anything. Trust me.