Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation(nbcnews.com) |
Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation(nbcnews.com) |
It was the Ayn Rand-esque hero, an Übermensch, who of course formed Google out of nothing proclaiming that individualism and egoism are the way to go, that they have a small alcove at best in between the productive assets of the factory owner who wields the materials to his will and creates his perfect city of perfect design that needs none of your contribution. That these graduates aren't be be valued by their creativity or self-worth but by the marginal contribution they may have towards his empire, to be discarded once they don't have anything to give. He's the ultimate factory owner, the owner of the factory that makes everything and brings light to all, and the masses just don't appreciate his brilliance and the brilliance of the other tech bros.
None if it is particular to AI, it's just that AI is the latest tool with which the workers of the world are deprived of the means of production. They know that capitalism is healthiest when the wealth is distributed, and here the Randian hero tells them not that the wealth will be distributed, but only the labour and the AI will do most of the labour, and that the human contribution is a penny for themselves and 99 cents to those that already have a hundred billion, and excited with an incomparable glee Eric expresses that the datacenter that powers the AI will be the panopticon through which the factory owner will judge the productivity of his workers.
It is such a horrifyingly dismal picture he painted right on their faces and if they would just allow that data center and stop booing him they'd understand, surely they must understand that he's the hero, that he and his Rearden Steel will make them the shining city that the unwashed masses for their utter collective incompetence cannot.
This just reads like "It's your fault if AI takes away everything you love. You clearly must have wanted it this way."
Like, no? It's the responsibility of everyone implementing machine learning that it be used responsibly. It's not the fault of the general populace if you abuse them, in other words.
It seems if you already have negative feelings about AI or the speaker, you’re going to interpret their comments as something that reinforces your negative feelings.
To me, the speech (as a whole) reads like: "don't assume AI is going to be as bad as the last technological revolution; embrace it". Computing is great and I love it; LLMs are great and I love them too. But computing is now used by corporations to harass and abuse us on a scale never seen before and AI is starting to be used for that too. So that is why I don't believe it's our responsibility to prevent the AI revolution from being as bad. All evidence points to it being worse exactly because of corporations like Google. I get that this guy is only the former CEO but the speech seems kinda tone-deaf to the reality here, and I bet that's why he got booed.
It's not entirely within the power of the creators of technology to control how it is used. In our case, they actively market the technology as replacement for human intelligence, at which it fails miserably and yet companies force it through. I would love to see a more grounded frontier AI company, but beyond certain safety measures, they can't stop people from misusing it.
He's not wrong that "the future is unwritten" — but that's cold comfort when you're holding a degree that might be worth less in 3 years than it was the day you started the program. The tech leaders saying "you can shape this" are the same ones whose companies are actively building the tools that might make entry-level knowledge work redundant.
The booing was inarticulate but the sentiment underneath is legitimate: "don't tell us we have agency over a transformation you're driving and we're expected to survive."
Still, I'd rather someone like Schmidt engage with the crowd than retreat to a bubble. At least the friction is out in the open.
AI as a technology is amazeballs in precisely the same way AI thought leaders, executives and mid-level management are not. And yet, here we are poisoning its innovation with late stage capitalism and privatized panopticons. Yuck.
And I know, I know, here are the helpful links before anyone pretends they haven't heard any of this...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/judge-sends-former-googl... https://www.gawkerarchives.com/5497193/exclusive-how-googles... https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2015/3/16/8227625/eric-schmidt...
TLDR: promoted well beyond his level of incompetence, but that's the American way now I guess.
"You have the power to shape AI" - So many empty words spoken!
Ali G’s version of it in his 2004 Harvard commencement speech:
> “You lot will become powerful people who can change de future — and you need to, coz de world at de moment iz totally f—ed up.”
Come to think of it… very appropriate today!
The effect is that a ton of these guys either experienced no consequence whatsoever or were able to lay low for a couple years and return to their positions of power.
Oh noze, triggered again. Bite me.
And never forget: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trustedsecurityadvisor_ai-wil...
Vacuous plutocrats can be pretty vacuous...
Who can ever forget "Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning."
Why god why do you take this guy seriously at this point?
Another buried case.
On the one hand: they fooled me.
On the other hand: hey, if the comments are that good, keep going?
How does that tie in? You have to like AI because of immigrants? AI is like an immigrant, you have to accept it? What’s the logic here, or he’s just throwing random phrases around, it seems.
It's a relatively cheap trick, badly executed.
Tenuous connection between unrelated topics to fit them into larger ingroup/outgroup dynamics is the junkfood of persuasion tactics. Bad for you but addictive anyway. If you look for it you'll see it all the time.
Corporate bosses have been screaming for more "hustle-y" employees for decades so that is nothing new.
Corporate interpretation: listen you filthy cattle, gen-AI is bottoming out all our pesky human labour costs and allowing me and my friends to milk every last drop out of this late-stage capitalist nightmare, you better get used to it because from now on 99% of you will just have to make do scraping by in the gig economy, selling your bodies or just generally being dancing monkeys for billionaires - we'll still hire some of you as nurses and waiters because we don't exactly want clankers looking after our kids
Other countries typically have tons of foreign music and entertainment, most notably American music. America is the one that seems to be looking inwards here (due to being dominant on an international market - I am not saying it is sinister).
Maybe it ties in because, if you're not excited and enthusiastic about AI and our new Ways of Working, you're a racist. You don't want to be a racist, do you? AI is basically exactly like a black person getting chased by a lynch mob. Do you stand with the racist lynchers? Or with the civil rights movement (the billionaire AI promoters).
I think it was a great embrace of freedom and open debate to boo him for only asserting predictions that benefit him.
I sense a pattern emerging.
For some context, according to the daily beast, student groups at the university distributed fliers urging students to “turn their backs to the stage” or “boo” during the former executive’s speech. The fliers stated that they wanted to “make it clear that the University of Arizona and greater community that we represent, whether from Tucson or beyond, do not support abusers being platformed.” Schmidt was accused by Michelle Ritter in a 2021 lawsuit of “forcibly raping” her during a trip off the coast of Mexico and later initiating sex without her consent in 2023 during the annual Burning Man festival.
I guess you haven't heard much from executives before? They are absolutely coocoo-bananas people.
When the ramen noodles run out, how many will begrudgingly create a linkedin account and pretend to embrace AI while they fight for the remaining/dwindling job openings?
The alternative is like Killgrave in Jessica Jones. People who never hear no break.
Layoffs credited, or blamed depend depending on your point of view, on AI are mostly a product of herd mentality. As for the advice to learn how to use AI, that's advice that suffers from internal inconsistency. If AI is so embodying of human expertise, why does one have to learn the correct way to use that expertise?
Unless the industry is able to reduce the cost drastically and soon, it will have negative impact on all of us.
The guy has always looked for way to keep humans as chattel.
This sounds cynical if there is a kinglike president, surrounded by a small clique of tech billionaires who all are becoming increasingly open about the kind of future they want to realise.
"Here's AI. Figure out how we can make money from it. We're adding it to your performance reviews"
Basically, here's a solution. Find problems for it.
It's just wildly unprofessional from management, in no particular order my frustrations are:
1. A majority of planning documents from management have become LLM output, which no longer actually matches the desired/required work (but it sure looks nice if you don't have to read all of it).
2. Management undertones are pretty clearly: "Figure out how to use AI to replace yourself."
3. The visibility of leaderboards that promote spend with no relationship to output - ex: employees who spend the most tokens are rewarded, even when there's no equivalent boost in productivity.
---
My take is that AI is actually a managerial crucible - aka, a great filter for companies with poor management practices and processes.
Company management needs to shift in response to AI more than engineering, and I don't think most are prepared.
Same where I work, and I suppose everywhere. It's upsetting, and there's no way of politely voicing concerns about this without looking like a luddite... which is obviously bad for you and your job security.
(A somewhat contrasting behaviour is say l deepseek who releases their models to the public, and I would not boo them)
Generally what I found listening to both sides is the latter group is very optimistic about AI and what it can do while the former group tries to be optimistic but just ends up coming off as doomery about it. And the problem that the AI space has right now is the doomery group is just more visible to the average person and thus the average person gets their opinion informed by that group.
I really wish there was a way to better surface the sentiment that I see on X about AI, the folks there aren't talking about how AI will replace you at work and make you obsolete, they use AI every day and they know that's just not realistic, not now and probably not ever. Rather they talk about all the cool things that it can help you do now, and how it can be a force multiplier in the best sense.
The problem with the elites talking about AI is everything they say is just so detached and abstract. And their giant egos prevent them from seeing the damage they are doing to the field.
But the stuff from the rich bosses isn't just rhetoric. These students are graduating into an extremely messy job market and AI is directly to blame. That affects students in a huge way.
“The same platforms that gave everyone a voice, like you’re using now, also degraded the public square,” he said. “They rewarded outrage. They amplified our worst instincts. They coarsen the way we speak to each other, and that way, and in the way that we treat each other, is in the essence of a society.”
AI Billionaire and AI Executive cohorts are openly advocating in media and the press for total job replacement by AI within a narrow time frame. Dario Amodei has spent years braying that AI will replace most or all jobs within half a decade; Sundar Pichai has openly told working folks the equivalent of "Good luck, fuckers" (his 2-DEC-2025 remarks about the working class "working through" social disruption forcibly imposed on them by his billionaire class); Microsoft's AI ghoul went on a media spree this year bragging that knowledge-work will be gone in eighteen months.
It doesn't matter whether or not any of this is true, because these same students - the law students, the pre-med students, the political science students, the psychology and history and econ and tech students and the like, they all have to write essays about this, read newspaper articles about it, read journals about it. They see the actions taken by this same cohort of AI boosters in blocking regulatory reforms, in blocking social programs, in blocking work protections and social safety net expansions and tax reforms. These students aren't stupid, they see the naked hypocrisy on display by the people telling them the sky is falling and are rightfully enraged at it.
You are telling fresh graduates, saddled with student debt, at a time of pride in their own accomplishments and uncertainty in their job prospects, to their face, that they have no future and that's going to be peachy-keen because everyone other than them will be better off as a result.
And they wonder why they're so intensely hated.
My guess is because of what he's done, or at least perceived to have done, in the area of AI. Because what he said (at least to me) didn't seem boo-worthy, but in the context of who is saying it, I can see it.
Put another way, if someone that the audience liked said the same things, its not clear the person would get booed.
AI leaders are not interested in open debate and they have demonstrated this again and again.
Shouting this person down is the appropriate, humane response.
No one with power like Schmidt will join in an open debate with you and me (well, unless you are one of the 9-figure millionaires that might be around HN), they circulate around others with similar power, they don't engage with the powerless, they have no need for it. They are not having a debate with us about rolling out AI, they just wield their power and do it unto us.
Getting some backlash is the bare minimum, if our democratic systems worked we could use democratic processes to curtail their power, unfortunately those systems are also tilted very heavily towards the ones with outsized power already. If you leave people without a voice, shouting the powerful ones down is the least you should expect.
> graduates embraced freedom and boo'd schmidt.
Schmidt: No, not like that!
I think that the deeper topic is that there is a sense of double-speak going around, they mean freedom but what they really mean is to use the word and its meaning and to attach it to their own goals, in this case AI because google has a vested interest in that.
People with disdain for AI are probably largely limited to one “elite” or another. Of course this goes for practically any cause. It’s basically impossible to to get large-scale momentum behind anything that goes against prevailing economic interests.
Of course he was still out of touch with that particular group, and if they all try really hard, maybe they can get some narrative out there, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Unless corpos discover how they can use these clashing views for market segmentation or something.
They might not know that those assets are AI-generated. It's easy to not know if you don't have this stuff (somehow) constantly shoved into your face.
I had a sticker on my water bottle from a brewery for several days. Just last night did I realize that it was completely AI-generated. The design was just text. Anyone could've made it with any other application, and yet, they chose to use AI to do it. The font was a typical font used by AI, and the hero text had low-res dots on it, a tell-tale for one-shot AI art. I threw it away.
My grandma can't tell the difference between reality and AI. My parents and older family members either treat AI as a dog ("wow, look at this fun trick") or, worryingly, as Google.
People younger than about 35 I know dislike AI, ranging from mild annoyance up to passionate hatred, except for the people who are all-in on it. Calling something "slop" causes a fun diverse reaction, with some people offended on behalf of an LLM, and with others poking fun at the slop referenced.
The vast majority simply doesn't seem to care outside of annoyance at AI being shoehorned into everything (but that might as well have been the web 3.0/blockchain/web 2.0/whatever term manages to milk investors).
I'll thank the universe for not knowing anyone that does this.
> Kind of goes to show how out of touch and insular the Hackernews commenter sphere can be. Almost everyone I interact with in reality loves LLMs and their touted trajectory.
And it would hold mostly true for me. This goes to show we should all be aware of our respective bubbles.
But maybe I'm just a hippie, who knows.
Point is: Just say it. If you think the parent is in a bubble, just express the opinion. You don't even have to mount an argument or present evidence, but there's really no value in calling somebody's opinion "weird" just because, essentially, "anybody could be wrong".
For example, is that true of your experience?
In general HN has been enamored by AI, with the sheen falling off only in the past quarter. This has matched with most people on HN being far more tech aware than the average user.
The issues with GenAI have also been couched to match observed reality.
——-
The point being, - You can have your experience, and you can talk about it to build a better understanding of reality.
If your mother is at all like my mother, she isn't burning through nearly as many tokens as developers who are utilizing AI effectively.
Datacenters aren't being built for the handful of people using a hundred or two tokens a month but the fields where each user is utilizing 10k+
That will never generate the revenue to justify the amount of investment being directed at AI.
In other words, we always do whatever is easiest, and rarely are willing to sacrifice our way of life to make real change. One person can never make a difference when fighting against people's desire to 'take it easy'.
Humans will always compete, there's never any rest. AI is never going away. The crowd is booing but they will never act.
Circus and Bread has become Casino and Colleseum. The competition never stops.
And also, that generation got quite a few students who did sacrificed their future in protests just a few years ago. The crackdown was very real and is still ongoing.
The only way to act is to not produce or consume (to the best of your ability) any slop, and be loud about it. We are being absolutely overrun with low-quality art, prose, and software, and making the production of such unprofitable (and even unfashionable) is the only reasonable action you can take.
In my non-IT life:
1. Vast majority of people have limited awareness and even less care about AI. In fact, they cheerfully consume AI generated Facebook, tiktok and YouTube videos, let alone articles, websites, reviews and emails - my electrician, factory and plumbing male friends like nothing better than to watch random 25 second reels of scantily clad AI women after a hard day work. Other people are enjoying non-existent huskies howling and kittens mewowing, listen to AI muzak on spotify, are amazed by non-existent weird creatures, etc. They are peripherally aware thay chatgpt can make you a nicer email or tell you about something but honestly cannot be bothered much. And then there's the faction that enjoys consuming manufactured outrage. They fall for AI emails and scams and generally blissfully consume massive amounts of ai daily without being aware of it.
2. There are young passionate anti AI zealots who are not in IT. Their passionate cries all too frequently fall on death ears because they have no actual fundamental thorough correct understanding of what GenAI / LLM is, its failure modes, actual consumption, or socio-political risk. At best, they post under every AI video "won't somebody think of the water!". Which, fair enough.
3. It's really only the technically aware folks that I find have any real sense of understanding or concern about AI dangers (as well as being the ones using / championing it the most). It can even be both in same person - as a parent I'm extremely concerned what will employment and political future be for my kids - so I took a part time role as AI focal for my team to better understand and perhaps shape / guide it).
(Yes, I'm quite aware of the risk this is all a "only those who share exact same concerns I do are legit " perspective. I welcome counter arguments :).
The numbers are not reliable.
The reason for all the LLM spend & forced adoption is to make LLMs a critical part of everyone's processes while it's cheap/free, and then crank up the price once it's too late to easily back out. Just like I will jack up the price on my grocery store once all the fools at competing stores who are charging their customers money go out of business, and I'm the only one left in the area, leaving everyone (except for me!) worse off than where they started.
It's a scam, and it seems to be working.
Same here, but I honestly think that's largely due to the threat is poses to their (and my) profession.
The Western media is stoking these fears.
Asia is embracing AI. Japan is using it in anime. India is going wild with large and small business usage. All of my friends in India report how popular it is, and how they're using it to get work done. I don't even have to mention China.
I am sick of how our media is brainwashing people to hate one of the most important technological developments in our lifetime.
They tried doing this during the internet era too. When I was a kid, every newspaper was going on about how awful the internet was. Didn't stop me from jumping on IRC and learning to program.
Every single time disruption happens, there's a cacophony of ire and disdain. Musicians that hated "electronic" music. Digital photography. This one just happens to be broader and even more impacting, so you're hearing it everywhere.
These tools are immensely useful. They can empower individuals with superpowers, like wearing an exoskeleton.
The conversation is never about monopolization or consolidation of power, which is how this should be articulated. Instead, it's always "AI bad" or "think of the water". That is 10000% the wrong framing.
That's a shame.
I assume the reason for the "deep distain" is rooted in fear of change, fear that LLM will make it harder to have a successful career.
That's a pretty negative mindset to have as a college grad just entering the workforce.
I'm not an AI fan boy, but we can't cover our eyes and cover our ears and pretend the world isn't changing.
It's strange that your comment puts "fear of change" right there next to one of the actual concrete reasons. Usually the people disparaging negative attitudes about AI say "fear of change" to avoid talking about the obvious reasons.
However, this is not the issue. The issue is that the tech is being hijacked by corps and already on the verge of being annoying. I my corner of the world, I get high level company message of 'use AI' ( which include goals that say so ), but also -- already -- ridiculous sets of limits on how much I an use it ( our context recently got nearly zeroed ; we no longer can upload unsanctioned files ). And if you want something beyond email summarization machine, you need special approvals. This thing is already being neutered at multiple levels and it barely even started to blossom.
Add to this clear indicators that our dictators have no intention of being benevolent and it is not exactly a surprise why younger generations are not exactly thrilled. I like this tech and I hate the retardation I am subjected to daily resulting directly from its outputs.
Why not? Most people do. There are still about 10,000 working blacksmiths in America.
Unironically I think we need more lifestyle and technological diversity in the world. End the monopolies that make running your own X harder. More Amish adjacent microcommunities and less monoculture. Federalism for tech / lifestyle creep.
The only reason these things seem inevitable is because our shared delusions make it so. We would have more power if we weren’t all so afraid to exercise it.
You imply that the change is inevitable. AI isn't inevitable.
It requires governments to allow the construction of datacentres and for companies to be able to spend vast amounts of money they don't have for the hope of future return, which will inevitably result in a too-big-to-fail cascade which gets money dragged out of the middle/lower class via slogans like "we're all in this together".
None of this is required. The idea that humanity is stuck on this future pathway is frankly bunk.
I don't think people are pretending the world isn't changing. I think people are right to be deeply skeptical about the direction we're headed in. More powerful tech companies dug in deeper into our lives, more government surveillance, harder times for small companies and more influence from mega-corps.
Lying, cheating and game-rigging at industrial scale powered by machine intelligence. He's lucky all he got were boos.
notably, I haven’t seen any ACTUAL technical improvements from LLMs, just a massive amount of slop. The ‘improvements’ are in volume of slop, not quality.
What you answer on a survey is meaningless. Look at their actions.
And no they're not being pressured to use LLMs, standards or expectations have not gone up dramatically.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable-knowledge/24/09/stu...
I don’t like driving in traffic yet I do it pretty much every day. Why don’t I simply not drive?
People can hate on AI e.g. because they see it as a symbol of inequality and billionaires deciding important things over our heads and also actively use it.
It is possible to be a user of LLMs and to despise them.
teens are not using llm for fun.
> had used generative AI at some point
also this is bit of a ridiculous stat to claim "highest user"
Will and agency are primal biological instincts, which a pure intelligence doesn't have. It doesn't want or need anything. Therefore it won't act.
A superintelligence with human primal instincts would be scary indeed, but obviously we don't want to build that.
I don't think you can divorce intelligence from all biological aspects and just get computational power. It's an interesting question though..
Setting aside whether a permanent underclass will be an outcome or not - is it not a bit incompatible to simultaneously believe that all jobs will be gone and that a subsistence UBI is necessarily very bad?
The way I see it, if strong AGI really replaces all jobs, then even a subsistence level UBI (by the new post-AGI standards) will be a world with ubiquitous resources and post-scarcity wealth where people pretty much spend their time how they want. Yes, perhaps it might be an "underclass" in the sense that Musk and Altman meanwhile settled Mars with some privatized space colonization, but I might still be orders of magnitudes richer than I am today - so why should I care, except for status games?
It's basically like someone in the pre-industrial age complaining that the industrial revolution will lead to the permanent underclass of people who currently live on welfare in developed countries. But this is surely a wonderful outcome from the pre-industrial peasant's perspective - even poor people in the western world live better than middle age kings!
In a true post-scarcity society where Musk et al are off colonizing Mars while you're stuck on Earth on UBI, doing what exactly? In such a future, AI has automated boring chores but also everything else. Art, movies, cooking, everything you might find enjoyable. So lots of free time to do what? Work on yourself? Nobody will care. Engage with your hobbies? Nobody will care to see them, so unless you're the kind of person who enjoys their inner life without interaction with others, be aware nobody will read your AI novel nor watch your AI movie, because they can make one specifically tailored for themselves.
To me this seems like a hellish future, a mix of "Farenheit 451" with people staring at wall screens (only AI-tailored for them) or the "basic income but restless" people from Earth in "The Expanse". It's even worse than "A Brave New World" because human workers will be mostly unneeded. Their basic necessities covered, but nothing for them to do, no real struggle other than boredom. Any challenges that remain must be artificially self-imposed, because the real challenges will be for a chosen few.
Wow, it took more than a century to get to live better than middle age kings. Do you think the people that lost their means to make a good living in 1800s care that we live so much better today ? It is incredible how so many tech people lack empathy for how regular people think or want to live.
I liked the Culture series too, but how they got to the presented post scarcity world is never described. How many generation lived a worse life than their predecessors? Do you think the current or future bi and trillionaires are willing to pay everyone a decent wage to live through this transition period ?
The optimistic case is technological deflation. Where goods and services become so cheap, you don't need a lot of money to afford them. If you can have a robot sort packages like,
https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/human-intern-beats-figure...
Why have a human do that? I don't think there's a person alive whose life goal is to sort packages. A human will lose a job, but only a job they accepted because the human needed money. Well if the package sorting drops the price of things, they don't need as much money. Now if every job is robotic, everything becomes cheaper to the point we don't need money for very many things at all.
That's the optimistic case.
For me to understand this as an “optimistic” case, I need to understand why people believe that absent a need for human workers, there will be any incentive for the people who control all of the capital to keep people alive.
This is what bugs people. We can tell the part they're bullshitting about is the promise of a subsistence UBI. No wonder people boo.
HG Wells really did have a time machine!
1. Yes the risk of AI corporate/authoritarian dystopia is HUGE, we'll have to fight for our rights MANY times this century. Transcendental AI takeover is probably less of a risk than humans in power using armies of robots and Stasi-AI surveillance.
2. Our current economy is bs and the last century of 'relative prosperity' was a bit of luck + tech and population boom + globalist exploitation and massaging debt. We've tried variations of capitalism, socialism, communism, there doesn't seem to be a silver bullet.
3. AI is not like other tech, and tech does not 'create jobs', it creates business opportunities which up until now have always translated to jobs. We've never had a "drop-in replacement" for a human employee, it could replace anything from 40 to 99% of jobs.
Those are the risks, the potential rewards are:
- OpEx converted to CapEx making almost any kind of business extremely efficient
- Nobody has to spend weeks away from family or risking their health in dangerous or degrading jobs
- Extremely cheap housing and infrastructure with everything from mining to construction to maintenance automated. Fixing the broken window effect of rundown neighbourhoods and generally increasing quality of life
- Almost nobody needs to commute, or do all the other things around commuting, vastly reducing transport, congestion and pollution
- Food can be grown in better ways, even at home, with less mono-cropping, pesticides and waste. Your robot can weed by hand, work the land 24/7 and with the combined experience of millions of farmers, botanists etc
- Healthier society, no need for convenience food if your robot can cook and clean, and it can make far tastier traditional food than McDonalds
- Many products can be made at home or locally. Mass production favoured big dumb machines but a robot can build you a table exactly how you want it, with appropriate materials rather than commoditising everything down to shitty MDF off-gassing formaldyhide. You don't have time to pick through recycled wood - your robot does
- Our existing road network can have far higher capacity because barely anyone needs to commute and idiots don't hold up traffic or drive distracted. Streets aren't jammed with parked cars, taxis instantly have 20% extra capacity as they don't need to carry a driver. We may even get rid of or severely reduce traffic lights, not to mention safety
- Anything in your life that involves expensive repairs or buying more dumb shit is improved, every robot is a plumber with 100 million job experience, so many problems are solved with a machine that combines cheap labour and wide expertise
"Oh but humans need purpose" I just don't think 90% of jobs provide purpose. Purpose is raising kids, spending time with friends and family, working on some project, art, community improvement - it's absolutely insane we spend so much time working on bs.
Even just one of these things coming true is revolutionary - we have turned into fat commuter drones stress eating stuck in traffic thinking about some abstract spreadsheet report so far removed from reality but stealing our sleep and peace. AI isn't the problem here its corporate greed and concentration of power that AI could give
There's nothing to learn, just some CEOs trying to get you hooked on their product and a bunch of hucksters trying to be the number one "AI thought leader"
I don't get people who believe this. Why would an AI company provide a service that someone can sell at 10x the price, mostly unchanged? Why wouldn't the AI company sell it directly?
Both? The messaging from the last 30+ years has already been that the only way to be successful is to develop your own capital, not to get a job. He's saying that learning how to use AI will be essential in developing the next generation capital.
I'm not American but for all its faults I can see it is clearly miles ahead in terms of economics, innovation and generally being the worlds only "real" new-world diverse democracy.
Yes it is pretty much run by corporate interests and yes it has started almost every war in the Middle East in the past century for the benefit of AIPAC. Yes it has skipped almost all the benefits of socialism that I enjoy as a European, and of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world I think ~48 are in North and South America.
Other countries do not "typically have tons of foreign music" - China is 99% ethnic Chinese, black people are basically not even allowed in restaurants there. The same goes for India and much of Africa. Europe is closest and the UK probably bridges the attitudes of Europe and America the most - which is why the UK also pioneered things like computing and multiculturalism.
These ghouls live in a totally different world than the rest of us and actually think everyone shares their positive outlook on AI.
We need more of this booing. Put up a consistent front and let these people know their views are not shared.
How hard should we 'try', how much time should a person spend working, learning, versus living?
I noticed that comes more from a place of not imagining themselves being the subject of the possible terrible consequences.
Many tech people think in abstract terms, they look back in history without thinking much about how the life of a normal person during a major transitional period was impacted, it's just a sequence of facts, not a collection of human stories.
It's sad because it completely detaches many of these folks from having empathy, yes, change is the only constant but if our aim is to progress as a species we should also be progressing on how to make inevitable changes less miserable for those impacted. I see a lot in tech people the thinking of technological advancement for the sake of technological advancement, not for building a better world for every human, humans tend to get in the way of major technological changes so in their minds they prioritise the advancements without caring much about the human aspect.
It's quite baffling to me because those are usually smart people, I'd expect smart people to have better holistic thinking.
This has been the situation for CPUs for decades. We now carry a 1980 cray super computer in our pockets.
>For me to understand this as an “optimistic” case, I need to understand why people believe that absent a need for human workers, there will be any incentive for the people who control all of the capital to keep people alive.
They won't need to engineer a Terminator style genocide of mankind. Man will kill each other in another war, like we always do. Biological imperatives mean we all kill each other until resources are abundant for those left standing. Then the winners of that war have a baby boom, their children are boomers for the next 80 years, and we start all over again.
The optimistic case says the robots are so freakin' good, they create the abundance for us without the need for the killing.
Awareness of issues only gets you so far. But it factors into daily decisions. And when it's all too much to bear, we just push it out of mind and continue with our little sphere of influence.
Society is built up this way: everyone has their own little sphere of influence.
Money and power have much larger spheres.
So you either protest enough to cope and move on, or you get angry enough to change.
Again, I have no answers, just observation. I'm fine with AI, despite realizing our economy is eating itself. You slowly begin to realize all we ever do is eat each other, or other things.
From that point of view, your stance seems more like a theory/ideology you project on the world rather then an observation.
That was not the original narrative by any company. I was here ten years ago when WaveNet and DeepDream were first published.
The media started shitting on this stuff immediately. DALL-E and Midjourney were not describing themselves as artist destroyers. GPT-3 was not hailed as a white collar job killer. Yet the news media hounded the industry relentlessly.
Labs started co-opting this narrative from the news media to create FOMO for investors and possible customers.
I work in AI. I had a coworker quit a job four years ago because his sister had a long talk with him that "AI destroyed art", which is something she learned from YouTube. Four years ago.
No AI CEO was saying any of this stuff back then. It was all seeded by the news media and certain YouTubers.
I can remember when John Oliver was joking around with Midjourney and DeepDream on his show and laughing about how fun and cool it was. He can't do that now because he'd be crucified for it.
I can go back and do an archeological dig if you like.
Sam Altman was talking about how we neeeed UBI because AI was going to take everyone’s job very early in the development of LLMs. I have no idea why you don’t remember that, but it’s in writing everywhere.
"Eat meat, said the butcher"
Roles are necessary because we simply don't have time to be experts in everything.
AI changes the way we contribute.
You're right, we all don't have time to be experts in everything. But that doesn't mean experts aren't valuable, or that experts shouldn't exist.
Anyone that thinks an LLM won't be up to spewing endless Harlequin Romance level prose is in a state of denial. And the cost of tokens continues to drop. This either means the current generation of content gets cheaper or better content becomes affordable through chain of thought token burning. I don't see a problem with that. The problem IMO is pushing a narrative that AI exists primarily to displace humans and the pushback is finally loud enough that it's getting blasted back into the faces of the billionaires. I see that as a good thing. May their endless hedonistic orgy at everyone else's expensive finally become a living nightmare of inadequacy on the hamster wheel of despair
The obvious difference between LLM adoption and social media, if you think about it for longer than 10 seconds, is that there is social pressure to use social media. Your friends are organizing and bonding on social media. None of this exists with LLMs. There is no social pressure to have an AI girlfriend, quite the opposite.
Also I preempted the "if all your peers were using these tools..." none of this applies to students. In fact i'm sure most teacher would prefer not getting AI slop. Standards have not increased.
Please read the entire comment next time before replying
But this is already the case now, no? The only person you do self-improvement or hobbies for is yourself or your closest social circle. We are already worse at everything than the professionals in the respective fields and also do not despair about it.
> To me this seems like a hellish future, a mix of "Farenheit 451" with people staring at wall screens (only AI-tailored for them) or the "basic income but restless" people from Earth in "The Expanse".
I think a more optimistic take people usually bring up is the Culture series. But yes, of course ultimately it all boils down to us being obsolete. That does not give me worse existential angst than life (to which there's no real point) already does, however, so I don't see it as worse than the status quo.
Well, you could be a professional in the field instead of a hobbyist. But not anymore (in this scenario). And even your closest social circle won't care about your hobbies, when they can easily produce the same. Even hobbyists have a (small) audience -- unless they are completely self-absorbed, which I know some people are, but let's leave them aside for a second -- and that'll be gone.
> We are already worse at everything than the professionals in the respective fields and also do not despair about it.
Yes, I'm saying in this dystopian future the professionals will be gone too. And then you won't be able to aspire to becoming a professional either, nothing left for you to look forward or aspire to. So what will we do with all our free time? Learn to cook? Nobody will be impressed, the Cook-bot in every kitchen will do it way better than you.
> But yes, of course ultimately it all boils down to us being obsolete
This depresses me a lot.
A good product should sell itself.
I feel that AI leaders have been shoving their product down our throats for the last two years (at least).
Also, just because they are very good at climbing the corporate ladder (which is a skill on its own), it doesn't necessarily translate to them being particularly smart on fields beyond their expertise.
> Also, just because they are very good at climbing the corporate ladder (which is a skill on its own), it doesn't necessarily translate to them particularly smart on fields beyond their expertise.
I couldn't agree more. Thank you for your comment!
This is what bugs people.
Don't use distilled little RTX models on your frankensteined home PC like a 0.00001%er who misses the ergonomics Claude Code solves. That's a "Year of Linux on Desktop 2010" grade failure waiting to happen.
Rent cloud instances and spin up thick model weights and contribute to the open source infrastructure for making this easy for everyone to use.
The hyperscalers should be eaten by cheap, competent, cloud-based open source.
Be the change you want to see.
??? - My comment doesn't even look like an LLM wrote it.
> It’s against the guidelines.
To be clear:
I wRoTe
- E V E R Y - w o r d -
by [picture ASCII art of "human hand" here]⠀
Do not accuse me of using an LLM as a substitute for thinking.
I do not use LLMs to write any of my Hacker News comments, and I never have.
I have used LLMs to help me search for information, but I have never once in my life posted the outputs of an LLM into a post verbatim as my own. That's laziness.
I'm not dismissing LLMs here. They produce better writing than a lot of humans. They are fantastic tools for constructing media, for getting work done, and for furthering your own capabilities.
But I curate my thoughts and craft my arguments. That sort of wanton dismissal of my comments is worse than using an LLM as a substitute for thinking. That's real "human slop".
Following the logic their agents should be able to find and make money with niche businesses cheaper than human entrepreneurs.
Peak efficiency in using coding agents is a weird balancing act at this point in the development of coding agents: being too incremental and detailed is inefficient, but if you let it rip on a task with multiple sub tasks you have to be ready for the coding agent to get utterly lost while providing you with only hints at what made it to lose its way. It's like an inexperienced intern with a high opinion of its competency.
LLMs trained for coding are most productive when pushed to their limits, but that's where they start to fall down.
If AI becomes common place at work (I’d argue it already has), it clearly will hurt you if you boycott it out of fear or anger that the tech exists.
It’s pretty simple
Getting more precision and consistency in the images requires additional technical configuration and actual artistic skill such that it more resembles using Photoshop and similar software. But what can be done with prompting is a lot more impressive than what can be done with rudimentary Photoshop skills and a big photo library to work from.
I used to attribute it to the individualism ethos and whatnot, but I no longer think that is a reasonable take in a sense that it is not the whole story. There is a steady flow of push to separate individuals from one another. For example, it is not unusual for parent to offer a sentiment along the lines of 'you are out at 18'. And this is just one tiny example. The funny thing, there may be a merit to letting a bird fly out, but we are talking about concerted efforts to push birds out while outside is set up to be as anti-bird as possible. Not exactly a recipe for success..
If anything, I think this sentiment has decreased over the years. Partially as a result of economic challenges for young people and partially as a result of immigration from cultures where living with your parents as an adult is normal.
But I do agree with your wider point about individuals being separated from one another. I think it has to do mostly with technological changes and an economy which causes people to uproot their lives and move across the country for work.
It confusing to me how people complain about jobs - there is no guarantee that any job will be there forever, there is no guarantee that current social and economic model will be there forever, things always change, you have to adapt, there is no other way.
Do you really think a 20 years old that is afraid of not finding a good job today cares about potential benefits 10 or 20 years from now ?
It's like Steve Forbes cluelessly joking that rise of Private Equity will make it easier for the unemployed to buy another racehorse. WTF?
I do not see how is that supposed to be a vision that would help them. Why would you learn when you cant get a job, cant do research and are not worthy of doing analysis? In this vision, all of that will be like playing piano nowadays - nice wholesome but useless hobby.
I dont think the future has to happen that way necessarily, but I also do not see anyone trying to sell happy ai future for the average person. Schmidt was not selling them a happy future vision either. He was trying to convince them to accept the ugly one.
i do not doubt that there were people like you who saw the problems and perhaps even wanted to fix it, but I cant help but wonder where it all went wrong.
also there is no guarantee for anything that gen-z wouldn't try to pass it to the next generation either. It's a ticking time bomb, Tick tock.
As I sometimes have to remind my own gen-z child who now unironically is blaming Millennials for the current situation. The Boomers still hold almost all of the reins of power. I want to note, in 1997 the President was born in 1946 (Bill Clinton), in 2007 the President was born in 1946 (George W. Bush), in 2017 the President was born in 1946 (Donald Trump), and in 2027 the President will have been born in 1946 (Donald Trump). I am 40, at no point in my entire life has anyone in my generation held any meaningful political or economic power in this country.
I point this out, because I agree with you, but I also want to point out that a big part of this problem is that Gen-X and Millennials basically never had a chance to impose their generational spirits on the world, they've been completely overshadowed by Boomers their entire lives. Gen-Z is now entering the workforce in a world controlled by a 3 generations back, rather than by the prior generation, and so that problematic attitude of selfishness that Boomers brought to every aspect of life persists because they're still in power.
I'm right there with you on breaking the cycle, but that starts with gaining the power to have a choice.
I could not agree more. Each time I do a google search, I feel like I've stepped into a severe reality distortion field. The results are simply WORTHLESS. It's not just that the AI summary at the top answers the wrong question, but the sequence of hits thereafter wander off into the weeds almost immediately. I routinely have to constrain the search in multiple ways (time bounds, specific word rejection, etc) just to get one or two relevant hits.
Frankly, I think I'm going to have to MOVE AWAY FROM GOOGLE to a subscription-based search service just to get any useful search results again.
I would absolutely do this, but the only subscription search service i know about is Kagi, which is a bit too AI-forward for my taste. I wish there was a way i could subscribe to "google but 2007 google but with updated results"
How many times have you written a boring CRUD endpoint that returns a list of results?
Half the stuff I lose time on is the boring boilerplate code (despite using frameworks). Now I can focus on the fun stuff like determining an optimal algorithm or even getting the LLM to walk me through using kubectl on the terminal
Now I know some kubectl commands off by heart, which I didn't before.
- kubectl get namespaces | grep "foo"
- If the people working on AI actually believe they’re building a God
- If so, why do they believe that
- If not, is there some optimistic case for LLMs based on something I don’t understand
What I got was “yes we are building a God, and despite all available evidence, it will be great! I promise!”
This is the language and behavior of a cult. If this is the actual optimist case, this entire train needs to be derailed yesterday.
You're wrong about the other side of the aisle, though. People who are otherwise pro immigration, pro social change, pro downwards wealth redistribution, etc. (in other words, not at all conservative), are typically against AI.
I suppose "neoliberal" means whatever anyone wants it too, but perhaps you were looking for "postliberal". From the AI summary:
> Postliberalism is a political and social philosophy that rejects the core tenets of traditional liberalism. It argues that liberalism’s hyper-focus on individual autonomy, free-market capitalism, and secularism has eroded social cohesion and community.
"Conservative" is used to describe the current US administration, and I suppose they imagine they're conserving _something_, but they seem very eager to attack the liberal foundation of the Republic.
AI is first and foremost a political artefact: https://tante.cc/2026/04/21/ai-as-a-fascist-artifact/
First of all, it's ultra ironic that someone who is supposedly critical of big tech uses woke terminology ("marginalized people"). Big corpos basically created wokism: Thousands of Employee Resource Groups busy with "marginalized people-issues" are far more preferable to unions.
And this example of western "fascism" is peak hypocrisy:
"Ask an image generator for a picture of two people kissing and you most often get a heterosexual couple, often white. Because that’s what the training data looks like. That makes “AI” perfect for creating the form of idealized, fictional “past” that fascists love to allude to"
Ask anyone on the street in a "non-white" country to draw a couple, and your chances to get a picture of a heterosexual one would be probably greater than what ChatGPT would put out. AI generators regularly putting out pictures of what a typical CCC-lecturer looks like today, THAT would be pure western imperialism.
"People in power, people with money – most of them men – get to make the decisions."
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GIBgrM4WAAAoqDw.jpg
Today's fighters against big tech are themselves completely enshrouded in the worldview that big corpos created in the first place.
This is like saying the entire democratic party is pro-crypto because of Kirsten Gillibrand is a crypto shill.
