Comment by zaptheimpaler
7 days ago
Most of these idealistic pieces about AI seem to come from senior, established or wealthy people who aren't very exposed to the labor market. In that view, the question of AI and its transformation is almost philosophical like this piece.
It's more a question of survival if you're labor though. It's very transformative tech but it's coming at a time when the scales are heavily tilted in favor of capital over labor, the government is the most corrupt its ever been and AI is going to make that much more extreme. It doesn't matter how amazing the technology is if all the benefits are going to accrue to the same few people who already have everything and destroy everyone else's bargaining power.
So far I've seen
- AI make a number of programmers redundant and their work is replaced with code of dubious quality and uncertain ability to maintain. The same is true for QAs and designers.
- young and old replace human friendship, and fostering their social skills, for conversations with their AI bot
- people avoid using their brain or practicing their skills in favour of asking some LLM
- people's work stolen, with the possibility of an AI subscription in return
- the laws on hacking and thief ignored
- a school of dead girls blamed on AI
The main benefit I've seen so far is that, since Google turned the web into a SEO hellhole, using AI to search is much nicer than wading through javascript-heavy, heavily-tracked, websites for a morsel of information. And there's some nice free translation and OCR tools now.
At least the SEO gamification was obvious and you could choose to avoid the noise. The AI-oriented SEO is just as bad and a lot more sinister.
How much of this is due to selective attention on the problems rather than the benefits?
It’s just one person’s story, but I thought this was pretty good:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/our-ai-midwife
It may work well for them, but is it replicable? Or is it a lottery winner trying to reverse explain the win?
For a tool to be deemed useful, the benefits needs to be generally applicable while the cons needs to be accidental or be reduced enough to not be immediately harmful.
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While it is certainly right, I also find the take to be a bit fatalistic. Nothing in this world is set in stone and everything can be changed if someone just injects enough energy into doing so.
This usually doesn't happen, as things often aren't as bad as they may seem, because lethargy and inertia are a thing and of course because self-preservation is an instinctual thing in humans. It could though.
As long as the status quo isn't defended by an infinitely scaling robotic enforcement war machine, physical leverage is always available. Just - depending on the scenario - at a steep price, of course.
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A lot of the bad in the world hinges on effective PR, insisting that the bad is inevitable and resistance is futile. You're supposed to feel this exact despair and choose to do nothing.
Don't support the bad causes by merely replicating it. (Which is not to say that we shouldn't be talking about these real differences you've pointed out, but we should probably do so differently.)
This discussion reminds me of “Only the Paranoid Survive” by Andy Grove (Intel co-founder). In this book, he talks about “a technological inflection point”, which is a time in the life of a business when its fundamental changes.
Intel had one in its early days. In the 1980s, HP notified Intel that new Japanese memory chips were way more reliable and cheaper than American products. Intel first denied vigorously, but then made a strategic decision to get out of the memory chip business, and enter into the new and unproven microprocessor business. This decision allowed Intel to survive the 80s, while Mostek and others basically disappeared.
Well sure, but labour isn't going to get much done by pretending that it isn't happening or making moral arguments. I'm put in mind of all the various powers that collapsed in the face of European colonialism - feel, argue and say whatever at some point only the massive power gap matters.
These AI don't get tired, they are still improving at unbelievable rates that can't really be matched by a human and they're already good enough to do most intellectual tasks to some sort of standard (often quite high). Attempting to assert the primacy of meat-based thinking is not going to get very far at the rate things are going.
> Attempting to assert the primacy of meat-based thinking is not going to get very far
That's the exact opposite of what I'm trying to do. I know they're superior in many ways, that's why I'm worried about labor losing even more power. All I'm saying is the gains from AI have to be distributed society-wide instead of being captured by the same powers that control everything else and this is a political task that we need to participate in urgently.
European colonialism was not based on a massive power gap. In most places it was based on making the right alliances with groups in the places colonised, making favourable treaties etc.
Why did the locals ally with them and not just tell them to get lost?
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Is mathematics research even a job you pursue if survival is the question?
Ultimately AI spend has been one of the largest infusions of funding into the small academic mathematics community in years. Just raw token spend alone probably dwarves whatever research budget increases have gone to that field in the past 5 years. That should tell you something about the economic value of that line of work
I guess a lot of highly intelligent people relied on their smarts to coast to tenure and then all the way to retirement.
Have you worked in academia? I have and I have never seen anyone coast to becoming a tenured mathematics professor.
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Don't worry - elite overproduction will cause a revolution and put an end to that.
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And designed using the AI provided by the elite.
Who will then end up in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_th...
Happens every time. Fascinating emergent behaviour.
I fear this is playing out now.
Except now the all consuming elite will have actuall killbots roaming their expensive condo irl.
The future will be interesting.
It was certainly not ideal that the end of ZIRP and the emergence of AI occurred simultaneously.
But, even as someone who is "labor" the one thing I appreciate about the situation is that the level of bullshit in companies has significantly declined.
Everyone seems hyper focused and results oriented. Maybe just my bubble.
Yes, that is definitely just your bubble. I suppose the word “everyone” is doing an awful lot of lifting here, but I fail to understand how anyone could see the level of bullshit in companies declining.
I feel bad for anyone getting laid off, but there was an unreasonable long hiring binge before the successive layoff waves - im sure a lot of people here have thought "what do we actually need so many people here for?" at the time.
I've never seen more performative bulshitting in my company, and the C-suite has never been more brainless, flighty and bandwagony.
Wait until the next time you have to do interviews and you get screened by an AI before a person ever even looks at your resume
Believe me, that's the most dehumanizing experience I think I've ever had
Most people who oppose AI don’t oppose it because it’s so good it can replace us. They oppose it because, in their own words, they think it’s hype and it doesn’t work. The first step is to collectively agree that yes, AI is powerful and it can replace us at work. Then we can speak about how to protect livelihood. How does one even have a discussion when the other side doesn’t even believe in the capabilities of AI?
Edit: not sure why I'm being downvoted because there are replies literally taking the exact position that I'm saying is more prevalent.
There is a bit of a goomba fallacy going on, not everyone who is anti-AI is against it for the same reason. But from my own experience, I find people who are against it for reasons of it devaluing their labor also tend to take the view that it doesn't really work, but this latter half tends to be a bit of motivated reasoning (in the general trend that if you are against something you will be more inclined to believe every argument that it is bad even if some of those arguments are pretty weak).
I 'oppose' Ai for exactly the reasons parent mentions, seems like most common folks over long term will lose much more than they could ever gain from it. Societal loss by definition, on massive scale.
Don't reduce opposition to something you like to some primitive irrational luddites, thats cheap and doesn't represent reality.
I respectfully disagree. Everyone I speak to in my circle, as well as in HN oppose AI because it is sold as much more capable than it actually is.
I asked ChatGPT to sample comments in HN without bias and find out which mode of opposition is more popular. Here's what it said
https://chatgpt.com/share/6abf5e0e-c45c-83eb-a3f6-b676b08f13...
>“AI is overhyped or less useful than claimed” was substantially more prevalent than “AI is genuinely capable and will take people’s jobs.” That held across two random samples of recent HN comments.
To steel-man your position, it is true that Bernie Sanders also opposes AI because it can cause automation. And that my bubble in tech might be biased because it consists of a certain kind of cynical person to think of everything as hype.
I wouldn't take that as a given. We don't know how AI will play out or how it will transform our lives. We could look to the industrial revolution to make a prediction, but the political, social and technological conditions today are hard to compare with those of Victorian England.
What AI lacks, I think, is a positive vision. The narrative is dictated by a small Silicon Valley subculture that unfortunately also happens to be a doomsday cult, and it is amplified by a media landscape hungry for the next clickbait headline.
By contrast, people in China seem a lot more relaxed and optimistic about AI. There are worries there too, but not to the same extent as in the West.
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> They oppose it because, in their own words, they think it’s hype and it doesn’t work.
This was maybe true a year ago, but is certainly not true any more.
The laments these days almost always begin with the assertion that the AI does work.
Mostly it's about funneling even more wealth into the hands of the richest and the incredible environmental penalty.
For me it's more that it doesn't matter whether it works or not, because funneling that wealth into those hands is reason enough to stop it in either case.
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I think this is how society and politics works, there are a lot of people at different levels of understanding and different opinions all having parallel conversations. We don't need to have these conversations in serial order.
I can see the capital machine is sprinting at full force to create AI products for and replace labor in every industry, so the people who think it's hype now will soon see AI enter their workplace and understand its true capability. Even many reputed programmers said AI was overhyped say 6 months ago and one after another have changed their minds. I feel like there's also a large element of people saying its bad publicly BECAUSE they actually do understand its capabilities and fear being replaced, but they would rather say its bad to try to slow its adoption or as a kind of defense.
The understanding of AI's capabilities will diffuse naturally over time, although of course its worthwhile working on informing people there as well. Bill Gates recent interview with Ezra Klein was sort of on the same topic, where he says no one outside the industry understands its capabilities and that's why he's trying to use his platform to inform people about it.
As a matter of coalition building, all we have to do is agree that AI is being rolled out recklessly without any consideration for the consequences and apply pressure accordingly.
It certainly works for software, but we may be hitting diminishing returns on software. You may argue it's been a social net negative for a decade.
The problem is that while it has warts still, in reality it isn't much different than the human slop from offshoring projects.
Thus it is already good enough for many companies.
I'm not opposing AI per se since I'm using it, but I'm not blind to the danger and I actually do believe we will be worse than better with it in the long term. Anyway both opinions are right: I think that AI is massively overhyped, and is worse than the AI overlord pretends, but it's still good enough to massively affect the employment, especially with the overhype. I also believe that the privatisation of all human knowledge and culture by a handful of companies is very bad. And finally, the day they make an AI able to reason ( or even before if it happens that enough data is enough to replace reasoning for most tasks) is the day 99.99% of humanity will be considered as useless
It solved the navier stokes millennium prize problem without any reasoning? I could maybe believe it if it was just something like deep blue searching in axiom space with lean with some simple heuristics, but in this case the formalization came after as a separate step.
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Why should we all need to agree that 'ai can replace us' when 'us' can mean such different things to different people: someone pushing out content on TikTok has a lower bar for accuracy than someone signing off on documents to be submitted for review by a court. I think that's the origin of a lot of discrepancy between viewpoints on AI that gets in the way of talking about the benefits and harms that we can each identify and framing the discussion around how those are changing when these tools are used. There is no inevitability about AI everywhere - we have the agency to decide when it's right to use it and when it's wrong.
"AI is not as good as it is hyped up to be" and "AI is 'good enough' for the overlords to replace some amount of workers, or at least to leverage into depressing their wages significantly and permanently" are not mutually exclusive claims. You don't have to buy the hype to agree that it is dangerous.
A chimp with a gun is not dangerous because of how good a shot he is.
I’m just waiting for blue chip company boards to start replacing CROs with agents. I’m thinking it will happen within the next 2 years
> Most people who oppose AI don’t oppose it because it’s so good it can replace us. They oppose it because, in their own words, they think it’s hype and it doesn’t work.
It's the opposite - they claim it's bad because they are afraid of being replaced. That's why absurd claims about stochastic parrot or plateau get repeated so much. It's pure copium.
And many math elites are financed by AI boosters like the Simons Foundation. That is why the online mathematicians at least leave no opportunity to boost AI. True opposition has been crushed by capital.
Isolated opposition comes from professors tenured in Germany:
https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/09/24/rulers-of-the-childl...
Maybe more German professors could assist because they have heavy protections?
These people are so cringe. Plenty of schadenfreude to enjoy though.
And many influencing agencies paid by Big AI patrol this site and downvote examinations of the flow of money in minutes.
I wish I was getting paid for it, but I downvoted you for free, for the shallow conspiratorial thinking without any evidence.
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> the government is the most corrupt its ever been and AI is going to make that much more extreme
This is cynical fatalism. Western governments have been overrun by neoliberal zealots for decades, and they've changed Government's purpose to near total obeisance to private interests. But Government doesn't have to be this way. If we don't want all future decision-making to be concentrated in AI/Robotics behemoths - or more accurately in a handful of oligarchs running AI companies - we'll need renovated and extremely strong Governments and institutions meeting the principles of democracy again (representation of citizens, not companies).
> we'll need renovated and extremely strong Governments
And how do you practically attain that without resetting everything in a full-blown Apocalypse? By rigged voting set up within the framework of the old terminally corrupt government?
AI isn't going to destroy labor if anything it makes an avg laborer more productive
There's zero reason to believe that. If AI becomes better at mental tasks than humans (that's assumption, not something I claim will 100% happen), why would human oversee AI instead of AI supervising another AI?
Bc humans can be responsible for approving / denying decisions in the end. Bchumans have the context a brand new prompt might miss. Bc the most intelligent and brightest and smartest AI ever built will do the wrong thing if given the wrong prompt. It can't presume to know things it was never told or has no way to know
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This is just how we're being tricked into it.
(you using AI now is just helping them to create better AI, i.e. they are making you work towards your own demise)