12 ms·

I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

164 points by NM-Super 8mo ago

ludwigvan 8mo ago
> The people in charge of AI keep telling me to hate it Anthropic’s Dario Amodei deserves a special mention here. Paints the grimmest possible future, so that when/if things go sideways, he can point back and say, "Hey, I warned you. I did my part." Probably there is a psychological term that explains this phenomenon, I asked ChatGPT and it said it could be considered "anticipatory blame-shifting" or "moral licensing".
- nix-zarathustra 8mo ago
  I don't think moral licensing is the correct term here. Moral licensing is when you justify doing something that is morally bad because you did something that was morally good. For example, if my wife spent the whole day cleaning, then she may treat herself the last slice of my birthday cake because she feels she earned it.
vladdoster 8mo ago
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- Der_Einzige 8mo ago
  Pangram is crap. Simple N-gram analysis ala stylometry techniques your local 3 letter has known about since the 90s are more effective. Also, I can make even the most slopped models give me 100% "human written" easily by simply fiddling with the sampler settings. Catch me if you can with temp = 100 and a modern distributional aware truncation sampler (i.e. P-less decoding, top-H, even min_p)
mjr00 8mo ago
> Microsoft’s AI CEO is saying AI is going to take everybody’s job. And Sam Altman is saying that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs. ANd Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, “kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people”. > I legitimately feel like I am going insane when I hear AI technologists talk about the technology. They’re supposed to market it. But they’re instead saying that it is going to leave me a poor, jobless wretch, a member of the “permanent underclass,” as the meme on Twitter goes. They are marketing it. The target customer isn't the user paying $20 for ChatGPT Pro, though; the customers are investors and CEOs, and their marketing is "AI is so powerful and destructive that if you don't invest in AI, you will be left behind." FOMO at its finest.
- bubblewand 8mo ago
  This is also what OpenAI’s “safety” angle was all about. “Ohhhh this is so scary! It’s so powerful we have to be very careful with it!” (Buy our stuff or be left behind, Mr. CEO, and invest in us now or lose out)
  - viccis 8mo ago
    Anthropic has been the most histrionic about this, with their big blog post about how they need to make sure their models don't feel like they are being emotionally abused by the users being the most fatuous example.
    - verdverm 8mo ago
      To me, Anthropic has done enough sketchy things to be on par with the players from Big Tech. They are not some new benevolent corporation backed by SV Many users don't want to acknowledge this about the company making their fav ai
    - slowmovintarget 8mo ago
      "This is obviously why only we can be trusted with operating these models, and require government legislation saying so." They're trying to get government to hand them a moat. Spoilers... There's no moat.
    - SoftTalker 8mo ago
      I was taken aback when I recently noticed a co-worker thanking ChatGPT for its answer.
      - layer8 8mo ago
        People have been thanking Siri back 15 years ago, it’s just a reflex.
      - steveklabnik 8mo ago
        From a year ago https://www.vice.com/en/article/telling-chatgpt-please-and-thank-you-costs-openai-millions-ceo-claims/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/telling-chatgpt-please-and-t...
bananaflag 8mo ago
> Being able to easily interact with banks, without waiting in a line that’s too long for the dum-dum you get at the end to be a real consolation, made people use banks more. Actually, in my city, not the ATMs, but the apps which made it possible to do almost everything on the phone significantly reduced the number of banks in the last few years. I have to go very rarely to the bank, but, when I have to do, I see that another close one has closed and I have to go somewhere even farther.
dgxyz 8mo ago
I hate LLMs because you can solve any problem that LLMs can solve in a much better way but people are too stupid, cheap or lazy to put in the effort to do so and share it with everyone. That and the whitewashing it allows on layoffs from failing or poorly planned businesses. Human issues as always.
- throwjjj 8mo ago
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deleted 8mo ago
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v3xro 8mo ago
> If I can somehow hate a machine that has basically stopped me from having to write boring boilerplate code, of course others are going to hate it! Poor author, never tried expressive high-level languages with metaprogramming facilities that do not result in boring and repetitive boilerplate.
- throwaway613746 8mo ago
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- WolfeReader 8mo ago
  Honestly, this. The mainstream coding culture has spent decades dealing with shoehorning stateful OOP into distributed and multithreaded contexts. And now we have huge piles of code, getters and setters and callbacks and hooks and annotation processers and factories and dependency injection all pasted on top of the hottest coding paradigm of the 90's. It's too much to manage, and now we feel like we need AI to understand it all for us. Meanwhile, nobody is claiming vast productivity gains using AI for Haskell or Lisp or Elixir.
  - lukev 8mo ago
    I mean, I find that LLMs are quite good with Lisp (Clojure) and I really like the abstraction levels that it provides. Pure functions and immutable data mean great boundary points and strong guarantees to reason about my programs, even if a large chunk of the boring parts are auto-coded. I think there's lots of people like me, it's just that doing real dev work is orthogonal (possibly even opposed) to participating in the AI hype cycle.
- munksbeer 8mo ago
  The rule of metaprogramming is that it ends up just as convoluted and full of edge cases as regular code, just without a nice way to debug. The rule is also that it always seems like a fantastic idea at first and will solve so many isues. I've been programming since 1994. I've seen a lot. I almost always end up despising any metaprogramming system and wish we'd just kept things simpler even if it meant boilerplate.
nativeit 8mo ago
The AI executives are marketing it—it’s just none of us are the target demographic. They are marketing it to executives and financiers, the people who construct the machinations to keep their industry churning, and those who begrudge the necessity of labor in all its forms.
- lambdasquirrel 8mo ago
  Yup, if you haven’t heard first-hand (i.e. from the source) at least one story where some exec was at least using AI to intimidate his employees, or outright terminating them in some triumphant way (whether or not this was a sound business decision), then you’ve gotta be living in a bubble. AI might not be the problem but the way it’s being used is.
  - SL61 8mo ago
    This has been the message at the F100 that one of my relatives works at. The CEO's increasingly aggressive message to their hundreds of thousands of employees is that they should figure out how to get 10x faster with AI or their job is on the line. The average non-technical white collar employee doesn't know the details of how LLMs work or any of the day-to-day changes in tooling that we see in the tech industry. All they see is elites pouring all their resources into a machine that will result in Great Depression 2 if it succeeds. Millions of people whose lives depend on their $50k office job in Middle America are hoping and praying that it fails. I live in an area that's not a tech hub and lots of people get confrontational when they find out I work in tech. First they want to know if I'm working on AI, and once they're satisfied that the answer is no, they start interrogating me about it. Which companies are behind it, who their CEOs are, who's funding them, etc. All easily Googleable, but I'm seen as the AI expert because I work in tech.
    - heraldgeezer 8mo ago
      I do love that. My career is built on people not knowing how to Google lmao (IT) To most people, AI is chatGTP. Maybe Gemini. Claude? No idea. VS Code, Cursor, Antigraivity, Claude Code? Blank stares. Same as when the computer came, some will fall behind. Excel monkeys copy pasting numbers will go, copywriters, written word jobs = already gone. Art for simple images = AI now all done by one person. Unless you want a Soviet system where jobs are kept to keep people busy.
glimshe 8mo ago
I suppose they mean "Why people who hate AI hate AI"... I don't hate AI and know many people who don't either. I find it quite useful but that's it.
KaoruAoiShiho 8mo ago
Sam Altman gave millions to Andrew Yang for pushign UBI, so they are trying to forewarn and experiment with finding the right solution. Most of the world prefers to shove their heads in the sand though and call them grifters, so of course we'll do nothing until it's catastrophic.
- deleted 8mo ago
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Der_Einzige 8mo ago
The amount of EM dashes and usage of negation does make me think AI wrote part of this. I'll give credit for lack of semicolons, but people are starting to get a bit better at "humanizing" their outputs.
- abhaynayar 8mo ago
  There are em-dashes, but the writing feels nice and unlike the default ChatGPT style, so even if AI, (which it might not be, cause people do use em-dashes), I don't mind.
- Nition 8mo ago
  I'm certainly seeing a huge amount of AI-assisted writing recently (that "I Love Board Games" article posted here yesterday was a good example), but I think this one is human-written. Pangram shows it as human written also.
- dasil003 8mo ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if someone had AI write a bot to post a complaint on every HN thread about how the articles smells like AI slop. It's so tiresome. Either the article is interesting and useful or not, I don't really care if someone used AI to write it.
  - Der_Einzige 8mo ago
    FWIW: When I accuse folks of it, take it more seriously - we literally wrote a paper (ICLR 2026) on deslopping language models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 Also you might not care, but normies sure care! https://arxiv.org/html/2410.03723v2 https://arxiv.org/html/2410.03723v2 https://arxiv.org/html/2510.08831v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2510.08831v1
- arkaic 8mo ago
  Nah I saw a grammar error few paragraphs in.
twodave 8mo ago
The reason I dislike AI use in certain modes is because the end result looks like a Happy Meal toy from McDonalds. It looks roughly like the thing you wanted or expected, but on even a casual examination it falls far short. I don’t believe this is something we can overcome with better models. Or, if we can then what we will end up writing as prompts will begin to resemble a programming language. At which point it just isn’t worth what it costs. This tech is a breakthrough for so many reasons. I’m just not worried about it replacing my job. Like, ever.
- deleted 8mo ago
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- dr-detroit 8mo ago
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abhaynayar 8mo ago
> students rob themselves of the opportunity to learn, so they can… I dunno, hit the vape and watch Clavicular get framemogged Hahah, this guy Gen-Zs.
- chung8123 8mo ago
  Depending on how you use AI you can learn things a lot quicker than before. You can ask it questions, ask it to explain things, etc. Even if the AI is not ready for prime time yet, the vision of being able change how we learn is there.
mullingitover 8mo ago
AI is scary, but look on the bright side: Whenever there is a massive paradigm shift in technology like we have with AI today, there are absolutely massive, devastating wars because the existing strategic stalemates are broken. Industrialized precision manufacturing? Now we have to figure out who can make the most rifles and machine guns. Industrialized manufacturing of high explosives? Time to have a whole world war about it. Industrialized manufacturing of electronics? Time for another world war. Industrialized manufacturing of intelligence will certainly lead to a global scale conflict to see if anyone can win formerly unwinnable fights. Thus the concerns about whether you have a job or not will, in hindsight, seem trivial as we transition to fighting for our very survival.
- verdverm 8mo ago
  Where were the massive devastating wars last time this happened with the internet and mobile phone?
  - squibonpig 8mo ago
    Yeah this was my thought as well
  - tgv 8mo ago
    You could say that it waged a silent war, and our kids' attention spans lost.
  - cvwright 8mo ago
    Very likely they got the causality backwards. Every time there’s a big war, technology advances because governments pour resources into it.
  - prewett 8mo ago
    Just for the sake of argument, I don't think the internet and mobile phones are military technologies, nor to GP use those examples. > Industrialized manufacturing of electronics? Ukraine seems to be exploring this and rewriting military doctrine. The Iranian drones the Russians are using seem to be effective, too. The US has drones, too, and we've discovered that drone bombing is not helpful with insurgencies; we haven't been in any actual wars for a while, though. > Industrialized manufacturing of intelligence I don't think we've gotten far enough to discover how/if this is effective. If GP means AI, then we have no idea. If GP means fake news via social media, then we may already be seeing the beginning effects. Both Obama and Trump had a lot of their support from the social media. Having written this, I think I flatly disagree with GP that technology causes wars because of its power. I think it may enable some wars because of its power differential, but I think a lot is discovered through war. WWI discovered the limitations of industrial warfare, also of chemical weapons. Ukraine is showing what constellations of mini drones (as opposed to the US' solitary maxi-drones) can do, simply because they are outnumbered and forced to get creative.
cdempsey44 8mo ago
I have some friends who are embracing it and using it to transform their businesses (eg insurance sales), and others who hate it and think it should be banned (lawyers, white collar). I think for a lot of people it feels like an inconvenient thing they have to contend with, and many are uncomfortable with rapid change.
dmm 8mo ago
> The classical cultural example is the Luddites, a social movement that failed so utterly Maybe not the best example? The luddites were skilled weavers that had their livelihoods destroyed by automation. The govt deployed 12,000 troops against the luddites, executed dozens after show trials, and made machine breaking a capital offense. Is that what you have planned for me?
- drewbeck 8mo ago
  I caught that too. The piece is otherwise good imo, but "the luddites were wrong" is wrong. In fact, later in the piece the author essentially agrees – the proposals for UBI and other policies that would support workers (or ex-workers) through any AI-driven transition are an acknowledgement that yes, the new machines will destroy people's livelihoods and that, yes, this is bad, and that yes, the industrialists, the government and the people should care. The luddites were making exactly that case. > while it’s true that textile experts did suffer from the advent of mechanical weaving, their loss was far outweighed by the gains the rest of the human race received from being able to afford more than two shirts over the average lifespan I hope the author has enough self awareness to recognize that "this is good for the long term of humanity" is cold comfort when you're begging on the street or the government has murdered you, and that he's closer to being part of the begging class than the "long term of humanity" class (by temporal logistics if not also by economic reality).
  - RHSeeger 8mo ago
    My take was that it's not > We should hate/destroy this technology because it will cause significant short term harm, in exchange for great long term gains. Rather > We should acknowledge that this technology will cause significant short term harm is we don't act to mitigate it. How can we act to do that, while still obtaining the great long term gains from it.
writeslowly 8mo ago
The vibes around the self-driving car hype (maybe 10 years ago?) felt very similar to me, but on a smaller scale. There was a lot of "You might like driving your car and having a steering wheel, but if you do, you're a luddite who will soon be forced to ride about in our featureless rented robot pods" type of statements, or that one AI scientist who was quoted saying we should just change laws around how humans are allowed to interact with streets to protect the self-driving cars. Not all of it was like that, I think oddly enough it was Tesla or just Elon Musk claimng you'd soon be able to take a nap in your car on your morning commute through some sort of Jetsons tube or that you could let your car earn money on the side while you weren't using it, which might actually be appealing to the average person. But a lot of it felt like self-driving car companies wanted you to feel like they just wanted to disrupt your life and take your things away.
zug_zug 8mo ago
Part of what's going on here -- why we have this gap in what we say we fear and how we act, is just a human deficiency. I remember when Covid got out of control in China a lot of people around me [in NY] had this energy of "so what it'll never come to us." I'm not saying that they believed that, or had some rational opinion, but they had an emotional energy of "It's not big deal." The emotional response can be much slower than the intellectual response, even if that fuse is already lit and the eventuality is indisputable. Some people are good at not having that disconnect. They see the internet in 1980 and they know that someday 60 years from now it'll be the majority of shopping, even though 95% of people they talk to don't know what it is and laugh about it. AI is a little-bit in that stage... It's true that most people know what it is, but our emotional response has not caught up to the reality of all of the implications of thinking machines that are gaining 5+ iq points per year. We should be starting to write the laws now.
- californical 8mo ago
  But it’s worth being careful - you could’ve said the same thing 3 years ago about NFTs. They were taking off and people made very convincing arguments about how it was the future of concert tickets, and eventually commerce in general. If we started writing lots of laws around NFTs, it would just be a bunch of pointless (at best), or actively harmful laws. Nobody cares about NFTs today, but there were genuinely good ideas about how they’d change commerce being spouted by a small group of people. People can say “this is the future” while most people dismiss them, and honestly the people predicting tectonic shifts are usually wrong. I don’t think that the current LLM craze is headed for the same destiny as NFTs, but I don’t think that the “LLM is the new world order” crowd is necessarily more likely to be correct just because they’re visionaries.
  - AstroBen 8mo ago
    Some of my friends bought a tonne of bitcoin when it was around ~$100 because it was clearly the future. I'm still not sure if I was an idiot or smart to reject that
    - 8mo ago
b8 8mo ago
Yeah, it's FUD. AI can't even do customer service jobs well and CEOs make hyperbole statements that they will replace 30% of job.
- FartyMcFarter 8mo ago
  In my experience dealing with e.g. Amazon Prime Video customer service, the actual people working on customer service can't do those jobs well either. As an example, I've complained multiple times to them about live sports streams getting interrupted and showing an "event over" notice while the event is still happening. It's a struggle to get them to understand the issue let alone to get it fixed. They haven't been helpful a single time. So if AI improves a bit, it might be better than the current customer service workers in some ways...
  - co_king_5 8mo ago
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- Macha 8mo ago
  To be fair, when has being useless stopped adoption of something in the customer service space?
ctoth 8mo ago
> And Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, "kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people" This is where the misrepresentation... no, the lie comes in. It always does in these "sensible middle" posts! the genre requires flattening both sides into dumber versions of themselves to keep the author positioned between two caricatures. Supremely done, OP. If you read Matt's original article[0] you see he was saying something very different. Not "AI is going to kill lots of people" but that we're at the point on an exponential curve where correct modeling looks indistinguishable from paranoia to anyone reasoning from base rates of normal experience. The analogy is about the epistemic position of observers, not about body counts. [0]: https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening
amelius 8mo ago
People hate AI because it does all the fun jobs.
- big_paps 8mo ago
  Haha, funny but not true !
cmiles8 8mo ago
The cracks are showing, and all the “AI is going to eliminate 50% of white collar jobs” fear mongering is simply signaling we’re in the final stages before the bubble implosion. The AI bros desperately need everyone to believe this is the future. But the data just isn’t there to support it. More and more companies are coming out saying AI was good to have, but the mass productivity gains just aren’t there. A bunch of companies used AI as an excuse to do mass layoffs only to then have to admit this was basically just standard restructuring and house cleaning (eg Amazon). Theres so much focus on white collar jobs in the US but these have already been automated and offshored to death. What’s there now is truly a survival of the fittest. Anything that’s highly predicable, routine, and fits recurring patterns (ie what AI is actually good at) was long since offshored to places like India. To the extent that AI does cause mass disruption to jobs, the India tech and BPO sectors would be ground zero… not white collar jobs in the US. The AI bros are in a fight for their careers and the signal is increasingly pointing to the most vulnerable roles out there at the moment being all those tangentially tacked onto the AI hype cycle. If real measurable value doesn’t show up very soon (likely before year end) the whole party will come crashing down hard.
- verdverm 8mo ago
  My hunch is the year of the AI Bubble is the same one as the Linux Desktop
- ass22 8mo ago
  The openclaw stuff for me is a prime signal we are now reaching the maximal size of the bubble before it pops - the leaders of the firms at the frontier are lost and have no vision - this a huge warning signal. E.g Steve Jobs was always ahead of the curve in the context of the personal computer revolution - there was no outside individual who had a better view of where things were heading. There isnt gonna be a huge event in the public markets though, except for Nvidia, Oracle and maybe MSFT. Firms that are private will suffer enormously though.
- topocite 8mo ago
  I just don't agree with this at all. Right now is the good time for the job market. The S&P is at an all time high. In the next recession, I expect massive layoffs in white collar work and there is no way those jobs are coming back on the other side. 40-50% of US white collar work hours are spent on procedural, rules-based tasks. Then another large chunk is managing the people doing procedural, rules-based tasks and support of people doing rules based tasks. Salary and benefits are 50% of operating costs for most business. Maybe you do something really interesting and unique but that is just not what most white collar workers in the US are doing. I know for myself, these are the final days of white collar work before I am unemployable as a white collar worker. I don't think the company I work for will exist either in 5 years. It is not a matter of Claude code being able to update a legacy system or not. It is that the tide hasn't really gone out in 15 years and all these zombie companies are going to get wiped out at the same time AI is automating the white collar jobs. Delaying the business cycle from clearing over and over is not a free lunch, it is a bill that has been stacking up for a long time. On the other side, the business as usual of today won't be an option. From my own white collar experience, I think if you view procedural rules-based tasks as a graph, the automation of any one task depends so much on other tasks being automated. So it will seem like the automation is not working but at some point you get a contagion of automation. Then so much automation will happen at once.
bovermyer 8mo ago
My feelings on AI are complicated. It's very useful as a coding autocomplete. It provides a fast way to connect multiple disparate search criteria in one query. It also has caused massive price hikes for computer components, negatively impacted the environment, and most importantly, subtly destroys people's ability to understand.
- hunter-gatherer 8mo ago
  I've come to the same conclusions. I don't think the feelings are complicated though. It's just personal when you find use in it. It's kind of like cryptocurrency in the way that it doesn't democratize efficiency and usefulness amongst everyone. So for a few it is a powerful and useful tool, but ultimately at the cost of everything else.
- slekker 8mo ago
  Thanks, this summarised my feelings as well.
doctorpangloss 8mo ago
Once I read a reference to Clavicular, I realized that the very first thing this author should do is stop reading the NYTimes. If the goal is to experience things closer to reality haha.
- FeteCommuniste 8mo ago
  He's kind of hard to avoid at this point if you're a regular on any big social platform (except maybe Instagram?).
  - layer8 8mo ago
    You can’t even avoid it on HN now. ;)
- NM-Super 8mo ago
  I don’t subscribe to the NYT anymore (I cancelled my subscription in 2022). I know who Clavicular is because of social media. The fact that the NYT thought the guy was worthy of a profile is yet another piece of evidence that I should never have given that paper money in the first place.
ergocoder 8mo ago
> I have a friend who is a new TA at a university in California. They’ve had to report several students, every semester, for basically pasting their assignments into ChatGPT. We've solved this problem before. You have 2 separate segments: 1. Lessons that forbid AI 2. Lessons that embrace AI This doesn't seem that difficult to solve. You handle it like how you handle calculators and digital dictionaries in universities. Moving forward, people who know fundamentals and AI will be more productive. The universities should just teach both.
- parpfish 8mo ago
  this is tough because we've spent years building everything in education to be mediated by computers and technology, and now we're realizing that maybe we went a little overboard and over-fit to "lets do everything on computers". it was easy to force kids to learn multiplication tables in their head when there were in-person tests and pencil-and-paper worksheets. if everything happens through a computer interface... the calculator is right there. how do you convince them that it's important to learn to not use it? if we want to enforce non-ai lessons, i think we need to make sure we embrace more old-school methods like oral exams and essays being written in blue books.
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testbjjl 8mo ago
Is this job obsolescence narrative top of mind in China? I wonder if they are they seeing these developments differently?
atemerev 8mo ago
Well, the process cannot be stopped or paused, whether we like it or not, for a few relatively obvious reasons. And relying on your government do do the right thing as of 2026 is, frankly, not a great idea. We need to think hard ourselves how to adapt. Perhaps "jobs" will be the thing of the past, and governments will probably not manage to rule over it. What will be the new power structures? How do we gain a place there? What will replace the governments as the organizing force? I am thinking about this every day.
- mitchdoogle 8mo ago
  Of course the process can be stopped. That's just a lack of imagination.
  - atemerev 8mo ago
    By whom? Well may be together with the full societal collapse, but as long as there are nation-states and competition, AI will be developed.
everdrive 8mo ago
"Change is scary," This is not the point the author was making, but I think this phrase implies that it's merely fear of change which is the problem. Change can bring about real problems and real consequences whether or not we welcome it with open arms.
ttuominen 8mo ago
Luddites weren't against technology. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...
fer 8mo ago
Disclaimer: self plug[0] I honestly believe everything will be normalized. A genius with the same model as I will be more productive than I, and I will be more productive than some other people, exactly the same as without AI. If AI starts doing things beyond what you can understand, control and own, it stops being useful, the extra capacity is wasted capacity, and there are diminishing returns for ever growing investment needs. The margins fall off a cliff (and they're already negative), and the only economic improvement will come from Moore's Law in terms of power needed to generate stuff. The nature of the work will change, you'll manage agents and what not, I'm not a crystal ball, but you'll still have to dive into the details to fix what AI can't, and if you can't, you're stuck. [0]https://www.fer.xyz/2026/02/llm-equilibrium https://www.fer.xyz/2026/02/llm-equilibrium
- SteveMqz 8mo ago
  The margins on inference definetly aren’t negative. An easy way to check this is by looking at the costs of using cloud hosted open source models, which necessarily are served at a positive margin, and are much lower $/token than what you get from the labs.
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avazhi 8mo ago
People don’t hate AI because they’re scared of it taking their jobs. They hate it because it’s massively overhyped while simultaneously being shoved down their throats like it’s a panacea. If and when AI, whether in LLM form or something else, actually demonstrates genuine intelligence as opposed to clearly probabilistic babble and cliche nonsense, people will be a lot more excited and open to it. But what we have currently is just dogshit with a few neat tricks to cover up the smell.
- hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 8mo ago
  this feels like a comment out of 2023. Ever since reasoning models they have become much more than "probabilistic babble".
  - avazhi 8mo ago
    Hence why I mentioned a few tricks to cover the shit smell.
    - saulpw 8mo ago
      The U trap turned out to be a lot more useful than a "trick". It's one of two reasons we managed to get indoor plumbing (which is a pretty huge win for personal comfort IMO).
SmirkingRevenge 8mo ago
Almost hard to remember now, but many tech companies used to be well liked - even Facebook at one time. The negative externalities of social media or smartphones were not apparent right away. But now people live with them daily So feelings have soured and tech seems more dystopian. Any new disruptive technology is bound to be looked upon with greater baseline cynicism, no matter how magical. That's just baked in now, I think. When it comes to AI, many people are experiencing all the negative externalities first, in the form of scams, slop, plagiarism, fake content - before they experience it as a useful tool. So it's just making many people's lives slightly worse from the outset, at least for now Add all that on top of the issues the OP raises and you can see why so many are have bad feelings about it
crassus_ed 8mo ago
Nice read! The main benefit for me is the reduced search times for anything I need to look up online. Especially for code you can find relevant information ware more quickly. One improvement for your writing style: it was clear to me that you don’t hate AI though, you didn’t have to mention that so many times in your story.
phoebusaicartel 8mo ago
The Phoebus.AI cartel was an international cartel that controlled the manufacture and sale of computer components in much of Europe and North America between 2025 and 2039. The cartel took over market territories and lowered the useful supply and life of such computer components, which is commonly cited as an example of planned obsolescence of general computing technology in favor of 6G ubiquitous computing. The Phoebus.AI cartel's compact was intended to expire in 2055, but it was instead nullified in 2040 after World War III made coordination among the members impossible.
SilentM68 8mo ago
That's excellent article. I also don't believe AI is the issue, but rather those that are at the helm of most of these companies. In my view, AI Companies like other tech companies of the past have no interest in serving society. So, you have a point when you said, "They don’t actually care about what their products may do to society—they just want to be sure they win the AI race, damn the consequences." It's all about money, and those at the top that have the money, have nothing to lose. I'd rather see AI being put to better use, curing cancer, other diseases. I think your scenario where, "Their Super-AGI will write the UBI law, and get it passed, when it has a few minutes between curing cancer and building a warp drive," is very likely now.
thothless 8mo ago
I'm still confused on how so many people are happy paying so much money, just to BE the product. Widespread FOMO and the irrationality that comes with it might be at an all time high.
lukev 8mo ago
I think the author is far too generous in thinking through the possible motives of tech leaders in the "what if they believe it?" branch. Far from embracing UBI (or any other legal/social strategy to mitigate mass unemployment), tech leaders have signaled very strongly that they'd actually prefer the exact opposite. They have nearly universally aligned themselves with the party that's explicitly in favor of extreme wealth inequality and aversion to even the mildest social welfare program.
renewiltord 8mo ago
Highly entertaining to me that people will form these Woe Is Me rings and just hype themselves into sadness. Then you give them a few minutes and they’ll start exclaiming about how society is all about loneliness these days and how they’ve been going to therapy for the last five years. The miserable have always been miserable. And no matter how much the world improves, they will find paths to misery. Perhaps the great lesson of this age is that some revel in sadness. Perhaps what we desire as humans is intensity of emotion more than valence.
skeledrew 8mo ago
> The idea of AI as an exterminator of human problems is much more appealing than AI as the exterminator of, you know, the career of me and everybody else on Earth. Here's the rub though: needing a "career" to survive and have a decent life is a human problem. It's an extreme case of mass Stockholm Syndrome that's made the majority accept that working in order to make money in order to have access to life-preserving/enhancing resources is a necessary part of the human condition. Really, that flow is only relevant when it requires human effort to create, maintain and distribute those resources in the first place. AI is increasingly taking over the effort, and so is threatening that socio-economic order. The real problem is that the gains are still being locked away to maintain that scarcity which the efforts address, so over time there's an increasing crises of access, since there's nothing really in place to continue providing the controlled access everyone in the system has had to resources for... centuries.
mfrankel 8mo ago
[flagged]
queenkjuul 8mo ago
> unless all those AI marketing materials are really meant for the ultra-wealthy, and not for me The only reason they exist is because rich people keep shoveling money into their furnaces. 800M free ChatGPT users do nothing for nobody, Sam A couldn't care less about them, the only people that matter to AI companies, and i mean matter at all, are investors. And every thing they do is about appealing to investors.
lasgawe 8mo ago
Is this article written by AI?
ModernMech 8mo ago
> ANd Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, “kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people”. Odd typo + em dash = "Make mistakes in your output so that people think it wasn't AI generated"
- NM-Super 8mo ago
  Author here! I didn’t use AI to write this. Jekyll’s markdown to HTML converter helpfully transforms a series of three normal dashes into an em dash. I did use AI to proofread the article, and implemented its primary suggestion (turning down a dark joke at my own expense that was pretty out of place), but the first draft of this was 100% hand-written.
orwin 8mo ago
Despite having a very good life, i always had trouble with self-esteem and always felt the impostor syndrome and not having really earned what i have (both professionally and personally. AI users and especially AI boosters are the best thing that happened to me. I no longer felt as an impostor, maybe the opposite. The confidence they gave me got me a promotion and a raise. I still get mad at AI sometime, when someone use it to resolve an easy issue tagged "good first issue" i especially took time to describe for a new hire to enter a very complex codebase, or when i review a fully vibe-coded PR before the person who vibe-coded it, but overall the coming of AI (especially since Sonnet/Opus4.5 and GPT 5.1) is great.
bitwize 8mo ago
The AI bubble is almost exactly like Theranos. I honestly believe that Elizabeth Holmes believed in what she was doing, and that if she strung investors along for long enough, she could fund the development of her magical nanofluidic CGM on steroids. She didn't have the knowledge to pull it off, nor to know that everybody else was far from pulling it off, and she Dunning-Kruger'd herself into a situation where the jig was up and she was caught. The difference is, with AI, it looks like they're really pulling it together and delivering something. For years it was "any minute now, this is gonna change everything, keep giving us money please" and it was all amusing but not-worth-the-hassle chatbots until recently, but Professor Harold Hill came through in the clutch and put together a band that can play something resembling music at the latest possible moment. And now we have agents that can do real work and the distinct possibility that the hermetic magicians might actually awaken their electronic god.
thefz 8mo ago
Nothing to say about the article which is well written, and I sort of agree with it, but what's up with the US being enamored with "vibe"-anything? Can we stop using the word unnecesarily (along with "x energy"), please? It sounds deeply stupid.
w0de0 8mo ago
> Not a Hater Nor am I, but… > Earlier today I was asking Gemini to find me a nearby bar that would optimize for price, tastiness of drinks, and “not making me feel lonely as a solo traveler on Valentine’s day.” …this sort of behavior I don’t believe I understand. It seems a silly abdication of living one’s own life. Here’s a poem from just me. — Choose a bar, ye human. Confront your loneliness if you must. Or flee. Wander a bit. Do a bar crawl. Take up smoking. Get wasted; be buzzed; abstain; wander, do a bit; fail to optimize - for at least one opalescent moment - if not, goddamn, why be?
w0de0 8mo ago
Perhaps wise, when reading these comments, to 's/{people,others,friends,those that}/I/g' Interestingly 's/they/AI/g' almost works.

164 points by NM-Super 8mo ago

> The people in charge of AI keep telling me to hate it Anthropic’s Dario Amodei deserves a special mention here. Paints the grimmest possible future, so that when/if things go sideways, he can point back and say, "Hey, I warned you. I did my part." Probably there is a psychological term that explains this phenomenon, I asked ChatGPT and it said it could be considered "anticipatory blame-shifting" or "moral licensing".

nix-zarathustra 8mo ago
I don't think moral licensing is the correct term here. Moral licensing is when you justify doing something that is morally bad because you did something that was morally good. For example, if my wife spent the whole day cleaning, then she may treat herself the last slice of my birthday cake because she feels she earned it.

vladdoster 8mo ago

[flagged]

Der_Einzige 8mo ago
Pangram is crap. Simple N-gram analysis ala stylometry techniques your local 3 letter has known about since the 90s are more effective. Also, I can make even the most slopped models give me 100% "human written" easily by simply fiddling with the sampler settings. Catch me if you can with temp = 100 and a modern distributional aware truncation sampler (i.e. P-less decoding, top-H, even min_p)

mjr00 8mo ago

> Microsoft’s AI CEO is saying AI is going to take everybody’s job. And Sam Altman is saying that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs. ANd Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, “kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people”. > I legitimately feel like I am going insane when I hear AI technologists talk about the technology. They’re supposed to market it. But they’re instead saying that it is going to leave me a poor, jobless wretch, a member of the “permanent underclass,” as the meme on Twitter goes. They are marketing it. The target customer isn't the user paying $20 for ChatGPT Pro, though; the customers are investors and CEOs, and their marketing is "AI is so powerful and destructive that if you don't invest in AI, you will be left behind." FOMO at its finest.

bubblewand 8mo ago
This is also what OpenAI’s “safety” angle was all about. “Ohhhh this is so scary! It’s so powerful we have to be very careful with it!” (Buy our stuff or be left behind, Mr. CEO, and invest in us now or lose out)
- viccis 8mo ago
  Anthropic has been the most histrionic about this, with their big blog post about how they need to make sure their models don't feel like they are being emotionally abused by the users being the most fatuous example.
  - verdverm 8mo ago
    To me, Anthropic has done enough sketchy things to be on par with the players from Big Tech. They are not some new benevolent corporation backed by SV Many users don't want to acknowledge this about the company making their fav ai
  - slowmovintarget 8mo ago
    "This is obviously why only we can be trusted with operating these models, and require government legislation saying so." They're trying to get government to hand them a moat. Spoilers... There's no moat.
  - SoftTalker 8mo ago
    I was taken aback when I recently noticed a co-worker thanking ChatGPT for its answer.
    - layer8 8mo ago
      People have been thanking Siri back 15 years ago, it’s just a reflex.
    - steveklabnik 8mo ago
      From a year ago https://www.vice.com/en/article/telling-chatgpt-please-and-thank-you-costs-openai-millions-ceo-claims/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/telling-chatgpt-please-and-t...

bananaflag 8mo ago

> Being able to easily interact with banks, without waiting in a line that’s too long for the dum-dum you get at the end to be a real consolation, made people use banks more. Actually, in my city, not the ATMs, but the apps which made it possible to do almost everything on the phone significantly reduced the number of banks in the last few years. I have to go very rarely to the bank, but, when I have to do, I see that another close one has closed and I have to go somewhere even farther.

dgxyz 8mo ago

I hate LLMs because you can solve any problem that LLMs can solve in a much better way but people are too stupid, cheap or lazy to put in the effort to do so and share it with everyone. That and the whitewashing it allows on layoffs from failing or poorly planned businesses. Human issues as always.

throwjjj 8mo ago
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v3xro 8mo ago

> If I can somehow hate a machine that has basically stopped me from having to write boring boilerplate code, of course others are going to hate it! Poor author, never tried expressive high-level languages with metaprogramming facilities that do not result in boring and repetitive boilerplate.

throwaway613746 8mo ago
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WolfeReader 8mo ago
Honestly, this. The mainstream coding culture has spent decades dealing with shoehorning stateful OOP into distributed and multithreaded contexts. And now we have huge piles of code, getters and setters and callbacks and hooks and annotation processers and factories and dependency injection all pasted on top of the hottest coding paradigm of the 90's. It's too much to manage, and now we feel like we need AI to understand it all for us. Meanwhile, nobody is claiming vast productivity gains using AI for Haskell or Lisp or Elixir.
- lukev 8mo ago
  I mean, I find that LLMs are quite good with Lisp (Clojure) and I really like the abstraction levels that it provides. Pure functions and immutable data mean great boundary points and strong guarantees to reason about my programs, even if a large chunk of the boring parts are auto-coded. I think there's lots of people like me, it's just that doing real dev work is orthogonal (possibly even opposed) to participating in the AI hype cycle.
munksbeer 8mo ago
The rule of metaprogramming is that it ends up just as convoluted and full of edge cases as regular code, just without a nice way to debug. The rule is also that it always seems like a fantastic idea at first and will solve so many isues. I've been programming since 1994. I've seen a lot. I almost always end up despising any metaprogramming system and wish we'd just kept things simpler even if it meant boilerplate.

nativeit 8mo ago

The AI executives are marketing it—it’s just none of us are the target demographic. They are marketing it to executives and financiers, the people who construct the machinations to keep their industry churning, and those who begrudge the necessity of labor in all its forms.

lambdasquirrel 8mo ago
Yup, if you haven’t heard first-hand (i.e. from the source) at least one story where some exec was at least using AI to intimidate his employees, or outright terminating them in some triumphant way (whether or not this was a sound business decision), then you’ve gotta be living in a bubble. AI might not be the problem but the way it’s being used is.
- SL61 8mo ago
  This has been the message at the F100 that one of my relatives works at. The CEO's increasingly aggressive message to their hundreds of thousands of employees is that they should figure out how to get 10x faster with AI or their job is on the line. The average non-technical white collar employee doesn't know the details of how LLMs work or any of the day-to-day changes in tooling that we see in the tech industry. All they see is elites pouring all their resources into a machine that will result in Great Depression 2 if it succeeds. Millions of people whose lives depend on their $50k office job in Middle America are hoping and praying that it fails. I live in an area that's not a tech hub and lots of people get confrontational when they find out I work in tech. First they want to know if I'm working on AI, and once they're satisfied that the answer is no, they start interrogating me about it. Which companies are behind it, who their CEOs are, who's funding them, etc. All easily Googleable, but I'm seen as the AI expert because I work in tech.
  - heraldgeezer 8mo ago
    I do love that. My career is built on people not knowing how to Google lmao (IT) To most people, AI is chatGTP. Maybe Gemini. Claude? No idea. VS Code, Cursor, Antigraivity, Claude Code? Blank stares. Same as when the computer came, some will fall behind. Excel monkeys copy pasting numbers will go, copywriters, written word jobs = already gone. Art for simple images = AI now all done by one person. Unless you want a Soviet system where jobs are kept to keep people busy.

glimshe 8mo ago

I suppose they mean "Why people who hate AI hate AI"... I don't hate AI and know many people who don't either. I find it quite useful but that's it.

KaoruAoiShiho 8mo ago

Sam Altman gave millions to Andrew Yang for pushign UBI, so they are trying to forewarn and experiment with finding the right solution. Most of the world prefers to shove their heads in the sand though and call them grifters, so of course we'll do nothing until it's catastrophic.

deleted 8mo ago
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Der_Einzige 8mo ago

The amount of EM dashes and usage of negation does make me think AI wrote part of this. I'll give credit for lack of semicolons, but people are starting to get a bit better at "humanizing" their outputs.

abhaynayar 8mo ago
There are em-dashes, but the writing feels nice and unlike the default ChatGPT style, so even if AI, (which it might not be, cause people do use em-dashes), I don't mind.
Nition 8mo ago
I'm certainly seeing a huge amount of AI-assisted writing recently (that "I Love Board Games" article posted here yesterday was a good example), but I think this one is human-written. Pangram shows it as human written also.
dasil003 8mo ago
I wouldn't be surprised if someone had AI write a bot to post a complaint on every HN thread about how the articles smells like AI slop. It's so tiresome. Either the article is interesting and useful or not, I don't really care if someone used AI to write it.
- Der_Einzige 8mo ago
  FWIW: When I accuse folks of it, take it more seriously - we literally wrote a paper (ICLR 2026) on deslopping language models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 Also you might not care, but normies sure care! https://arxiv.org/html/2410.03723v2 https://arxiv.org/html/2410.03723v2 https://arxiv.org/html/2510.08831v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2510.08831v1
arkaic 8mo ago
Nah I saw a grammar error few paragraphs in.

twodave 8mo ago

The reason I dislike AI use in certain modes is because the end result looks like a Happy Meal toy from McDonalds. It looks roughly like the thing you wanted or expected, but on even a casual examination it falls far short. I don’t believe this is something we can overcome with better models. Or, if we can then what we will end up writing as prompts will begin to resemble a programming language. At which point it just isn’t worth what it costs. This tech is a breakthrough for so many reasons. I’m just not worried about it replacing my job. Like, ever.

deleted 8mo ago
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dr-detroit 8mo ago
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abhaynayar 8mo ago

> students rob themselves of the opportunity to learn, so they can… I dunno, hit the vape and watch Clavicular get framemogged Hahah, this guy Gen-Zs.

chung8123 8mo ago
Depending on how you use AI you can learn things a lot quicker than before. You can ask it questions, ask it to explain things, etc. Even if the AI is not ready for prime time yet, the vision of being able change how we learn is there.

mullingitover 8mo ago

AI is scary, but look on the bright side: Whenever there is a massive paradigm shift in technology like we have with AI today, there are absolutely massive, devastating wars because the existing strategic stalemates are broken. Industrialized precision manufacturing? Now we have to figure out who can make the most rifles and machine guns. Industrialized manufacturing of high explosives? Time to have a whole world war about it. Industrialized manufacturing of electronics? Time for another world war. Industrialized manufacturing of intelligence will certainly lead to a global scale conflict to see if anyone can win formerly unwinnable fights. Thus the concerns about whether you have a job or not will, in hindsight, seem trivial as we transition to fighting for our very survival.

verdverm 8mo ago
Where were the massive devastating wars last time this happened with the internet and mobile phone?
- squibonpig 8mo ago
  Yeah this was my thought as well
- tgv 8mo ago
  You could say that it waged a silent war, and our kids' attention spans lost.
- cvwright 8mo ago
  Very likely they got the causality backwards. Every time there’s a big war, technology advances because governments pour resources into it.
- prewett 8mo ago
  Just for the sake of argument, I don't think the internet and mobile phones are military technologies, nor to GP use those examples. > Industrialized manufacturing of electronics? Ukraine seems to be exploring this and rewriting military doctrine. The Iranian drones the Russians are using seem to be effective, too. The US has drones, too, and we've discovered that drone bombing is not helpful with insurgencies; we haven't been in any actual wars for a while, though. > Industrialized manufacturing of intelligence I don't think we've gotten far enough to discover how/if this is effective. If GP means AI, then we have no idea. If GP means fake news via social media, then we may already be seeing the beginning effects. Both Obama and Trump had a lot of their support from the social media. Having written this, I think I flatly disagree with GP that technology causes wars because of its power. I think it may enable some wars because of its power differential, but I think a lot is discovered through war. WWI discovered the limitations of industrial warfare, also of chemical weapons. Ukraine is showing what constellations of mini drones (as opposed to the US' solitary maxi-drones) can do, simply because they are outnumbered and forced to get creative.

cdempsey44 8mo ago

I have some friends who are embracing it and using it to transform their businesses (eg insurance sales), and others who hate it and think it should be banned (lawyers, white collar). I think for a lot of people it feels like an inconvenient thing they have to contend with, and many are uncomfortable with rapid change.

dmm 8mo ago

> The classical cultural example is the Luddites, a social movement that failed so utterly Maybe not the best example? The luddites were skilled weavers that had their livelihoods destroyed by automation. The govt deployed 12,000 troops against the luddites, executed dozens after show trials, and made machine breaking a capital offense. Is that what you have planned for me?

drewbeck 8mo ago
I caught that too. The piece is otherwise good imo, but "the luddites were wrong" is wrong. In fact, later in the piece the author essentially agrees – the proposals for UBI and other policies that would support workers (or ex-workers) through any AI-driven transition are an acknowledgement that yes, the new machines will destroy people's livelihoods and that, yes, this is bad, and that yes, the industrialists, the government and the people should care. The luddites were making exactly that case. > while it’s true that textile experts did suffer from the advent of mechanical weaving, their loss was far outweighed by the gains the rest of the human race received from being able to afford more than two shirts over the average lifespan I hope the author has enough self awareness to recognize that "this is good for the long term of humanity" is cold comfort when you're begging on the street or the government has murdered you, and that he's closer to being part of the begging class than the "long term of humanity" class (by temporal logistics if not also by economic reality).
- RHSeeger 8mo ago
  My take was that it's not > We should hate/destroy this technology because it will cause significant short term harm, in exchange for great long term gains. Rather > We should acknowledge that this technology will cause significant short term harm is we don't act to mitigate it. How can we act to do that, while still obtaining the great long term gains from it.

writeslowly 8mo ago

The vibes around the self-driving car hype (maybe 10 years ago?) felt very similar to me, but on a smaller scale. There was a lot of "You might like driving your car and having a steering wheel, but if you do, you're a luddite who will soon be forced to ride about in our featureless rented robot pods" type of statements, or that one AI scientist who was quoted saying we should just change laws around how humans are allowed to interact with streets to protect the self-driving cars. Not all of it was like that, I think oddly enough it was Tesla or just Elon Musk claimng you'd soon be able to take a nap in your car on your morning commute through some sort of Jetsons tube or that you could let your car earn money on the side while you weren't using it, which might actually be appealing to the average person. But a lot of it felt like self-driving car companies wanted you to feel like they just wanted to disrupt your life and take your things away.

zug_zug 8mo ago

Part of what's going on here -- why we have this gap in what we say we fear and how we act, is just a human deficiency. I remember when Covid got out of control in China a lot of people around me [in NY] had this energy of "so what it'll never come to us." I'm not saying that they believed that, or had some rational opinion, but they had an emotional energy of "It's not big deal." The emotional response can be much slower than the intellectual response, even if that fuse is already lit and the eventuality is indisputable. Some people are good at not having that disconnect. They see the internet in 1980 and they know that someday 60 years from now it'll be the majority of shopping, even though 95% of people they talk to don't know what it is and laugh about it. AI is a little-bit in that stage... It's true that most people know what it is, but our emotional response has not caught up to the reality of all of the implications of thinking machines that are gaining 5+ iq points per year. We should be starting to write the laws now.

californical 8mo ago
But it’s worth being careful - you could’ve said the same thing 3 years ago about NFTs. They were taking off and people made very convincing arguments about how it was the future of concert tickets, and eventually commerce in general. If we started writing lots of laws around NFTs, it would just be a bunch of pointless (at best), or actively harmful laws. Nobody cares about NFTs today, but there were genuinely good ideas about how they’d change commerce being spouted by a small group of people. People can say “this is the future” while most people dismiss them, and honestly the people predicting tectonic shifts are usually wrong. I don’t think that the current LLM craze is headed for the same destiny as NFTs, but I don’t think that the “LLM is the new world order” crowd is necessarily more likely to be correct just because they’re visionaries.
- AstroBen 8mo ago
  Some of my friends bought a tonne of bitcoin when it was around ~$100 because it was clearly the future. I'm still not sure if I was an idiot or smart to reject that
  - 8mo ago

b8 8mo ago

Yeah, it's FUD. AI can't even do customer service jobs well and CEOs make hyperbole statements that they will replace 30% of job.

FartyMcFarter 8mo ago
In my experience dealing with e.g. Amazon Prime Video customer service, the actual people working on customer service can't do those jobs well either. As an example, I've complained multiple times to them about live sports streams getting interrupted and showing an "event over" notice while the event is still happening. It's a struggle to get them to understand the issue let alone to get it fixed. They haven't been helpful a single time. So if AI improves a bit, it might be better than the current customer service workers in some ways...
- co_king_5 8mo ago
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Macha 8mo ago
To be fair, when has being useless stopped adoption of something in the customer service space?

ctoth 8mo ago

> And Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, "kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people" This is where the misrepresentation... no, the lie comes in. It always does in these "sensible middle" posts! the genre requires flattening both sides into dumber versions of themselves to keep the author positioned between two caricatures. Supremely done, OP. If you read Matt's original article[0] you see he was saying something very different. Not "AI is going to kill lots of people" but that we're at the point on an exponential curve where correct modeling looks indistinguishable from paranoia to anyone reasoning from base rates of normal experience. The analogy is about the epistemic position of observers, not about body counts. [0]: https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening

amelius 8mo ago

People hate AI because it does all the fun jobs.

big_paps 8mo ago
Haha, funny but not true !

cmiles8 8mo ago

The cracks are showing, and all the “AI is going to eliminate 50% of white collar jobs” fear mongering is simply signaling we’re in the final stages before the bubble implosion. The AI bros desperately need everyone to believe this is the future. But the data just isn’t there to support it. More and more companies are coming out saying AI was good to have, but the mass productivity gains just aren’t there. A bunch of companies used AI as an excuse to do mass layoffs only to then have to admit this was basically just standard restructuring and house cleaning (eg Amazon). Theres so much focus on white collar jobs in the US but these have already been automated and offshored to death. What’s there now is truly a survival of the fittest. Anything that’s highly predicable, routine, and fits recurring patterns (ie what AI is actually good at) was long since offshored to places like India. To the extent that AI does cause mass disruption to jobs, the India tech and BPO sectors would be ground zero… not white collar jobs in the US. The AI bros are in a fight for their careers and the signal is increasingly pointing to the most vulnerable roles out there at the moment being all those tangentially tacked onto the AI hype cycle. If real measurable value doesn’t show up very soon (likely before year end) the whole party will come crashing down hard.

verdverm 8mo ago
My hunch is the year of the AI Bubble is the same one as the Linux Desktop
ass22 8mo ago
The openclaw stuff for me is a prime signal we are now reaching the maximal size of the bubble before it pops - the leaders of the firms at the frontier are lost and have no vision - this a huge warning signal. E.g Steve Jobs was always ahead of the curve in the context of the personal computer revolution - there was no outside individual who had a better view of where things were heading. There isnt gonna be a huge event in the public markets though, except for Nvidia, Oracle and maybe MSFT. Firms that are private will suffer enormously though.
topocite 8mo ago
I just don't agree with this at all. Right now is the good time for the job market. The S&P is at an all time high. In the next recession, I expect massive layoffs in white collar work and there is no way those jobs are coming back on the other side. 40-50% of US white collar work hours are spent on procedural, rules-based tasks. Then another large chunk is managing the people doing procedural, rules-based tasks and support of people doing rules based tasks. Salary and benefits are 50% of operating costs for most business. Maybe you do something really interesting and unique but that is just not what most white collar workers in the US are doing. I know for myself, these are the final days of white collar work before I am unemployable as a white collar worker. I don't think the company I work for will exist either in 5 years. It is not a matter of Claude code being able to update a legacy system or not. It is that the tide hasn't really gone out in 15 years and all these zombie companies are going to get wiped out at the same time AI is automating the white collar jobs. Delaying the business cycle from clearing over and over is not a free lunch, it is a bill that has been stacking up for a long time. On the other side, the business as usual of today won't be an option. From my own white collar experience, I think if you view procedural rules-based tasks as a graph, the automation of any one task depends so much on other tasks being automated. So it will seem like the automation is not working but at some point you get a contagion of automation. Then so much automation will happen at once.

bovermyer 8mo ago

My feelings on AI are complicated. It's very useful as a coding autocomplete. It provides a fast way to connect multiple disparate search criteria in one query. It also has caused massive price hikes for computer components, negatively impacted the environment, and most importantly, subtly destroys people's ability to understand.

hunter-gatherer 8mo ago
I've come to the same conclusions. I don't think the feelings are complicated though. It's just personal when you find use in it. It's kind of like cryptocurrency in the way that it doesn't democratize efficiency and usefulness amongst everyone. So for a few it is a powerful and useful tool, but ultimately at the cost of everything else.
slekker 8mo ago
Thanks, this summarised my feelings as well.

doctorpangloss 8mo ago

Once I read a reference to Clavicular, I realized that the very first thing this author should do is stop reading the NYTimes. If the goal is to experience things closer to reality haha.

FeteCommuniste 8mo ago
He's kind of hard to avoid at this point if you're a regular on any big social platform (except maybe Instagram?).
- layer8 8mo ago
  You can’t even avoid it on HN now. ;)
NM-Super 8mo ago
I don’t subscribe to the NYT anymore (I cancelled my subscription in 2022). I know who Clavicular is because of social media. The fact that the NYT thought the guy was worthy of a profile is yet another piece of evidence that I should never have given that paper money in the first place.

ergocoder 8mo ago

> I have a friend who is a new TA at a university in California. They’ve had to report several students, every semester, for basically pasting their assignments into ChatGPT. We've solved this problem before. You have 2 separate segments: 1. Lessons that forbid AI 2. Lessons that embrace AI This doesn't seem that difficult to solve. You handle it like how you handle calculators and digital dictionaries in universities. Moving forward, people who know fundamentals and AI will be more productive. The universities should just teach both.

parpfish 8mo ago
this is tough because we've spent years building everything in education to be mediated by computers and technology, and now we're realizing that maybe we went a little overboard and over-fit to "lets do everything on computers". it was easy to force kids to learn multiplication tables in their head when there were in-person tests and pencil-and-paper worksheets. if everything happens through a computer interface... the calculator is right there. how do you convince them that it's important to learn to not use it? if we want to enforce non-ai lessons, i think we need to make sure we embrace more old-school methods like oral exams and essays being written in blue books.
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testbjjl 8mo ago

Is this job obsolescence narrative top of mind in China? I wonder if they are they seeing these developments differently?

atemerev 8mo ago

Well, the process cannot be stopped or paused, whether we like it or not, for a few relatively obvious reasons. And relying on your government do do the right thing as of 2026 is, frankly, not a great idea. We need to think hard ourselves how to adapt. Perhaps "jobs" will be the thing of the past, and governments will probably not manage to rule over it. What will be the new power structures? How do we gain a place there? What will replace the governments as the organizing force? I am thinking about this every day.

mitchdoogle 8mo ago
Of course the process can be stopped. That's just a lack of imagination.
- atemerev 8mo ago
  By whom? Well may be together with the full societal collapse, but as long as there are nation-states and competition, AI will be developed.

everdrive 8mo ago

"Change is scary," This is not the point the author was making, but I think this phrase implies that it's merely fear of change which is the problem. Change can bring about real problems and real consequences whether or not we welcome it with open arms.

ttuominen 8mo ago

Luddites weren't against technology. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...

fer 8mo ago

Disclaimer: self plug[0] I honestly believe everything will be normalized. A genius with the same model as I will be more productive than I, and I will be more productive than some other people, exactly the same as without AI. If AI starts doing things beyond what you can understand, control and own, it stops being useful, the extra capacity is wasted capacity, and there are diminishing returns for ever growing investment needs. The margins fall off a cliff (and they're already negative), and the only economic improvement will come from Moore's Law in terms of power needed to generate stuff. The nature of the work will change, you'll manage agents and what not, I'm not a crystal ball, but you'll still have to dive into the details to fix what AI can't, and if you can't, you're stuck. [0]https://www.fer.xyz/2026/02/llm-equilibrium https://www.fer.xyz/2026/02/llm-equilibrium

SteveMqz 8mo ago
The margins on inference definetly aren’t negative. An easy way to check this is by looking at the costs of using cloud hosted open source models, which necessarily are served at a positive margin, and are much lower $/token than what you get from the labs.
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avazhi 8mo ago

People don’t hate AI because they’re scared of it taking their jobs. They hate it because it’s massively overhyped while simultaneously being shoved down their throats like it’s a panacea. If and when AI, whether in LLM form or something else, actually demonstrates genuine intelligence as opposed to clearly probabilistic babble and cliche nonsense, people will be a lot more excited and open to it. But what we have currently is just dogshit with a few neat tricks to cover up the smell.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 8mo ago
this feels like a comment out of 2023. Ever since reasoning models they have become much more than "probabilistic babble".
- avazhi 8mo ago
  Hence why I mentioned a few tricks to cover the shit smell.
  - saulpw 8mo ago
    The U trap turned out to be a lot more useful than a "trick". It's one of two reasons we managed to get indoor plumbing (which is a pretty huge win for personal comfort IMO).

SmirkingRevenge 8mo ago

Almost hard to remember now, but many tech companies used to be well liked - even Facebook at one time. The negative externalities of social media or smartphones were not apparent right away. But now people live with them daily So feelings have soured and tech seems more dystopian. Any new disruptive technology is bound to be looked upon with greater baseline cynicism, no matter how magical. That's just baked in now, I think. When it comes to AI, many people are experiencing all the negative externalities first, in the form of scams, slop, plagiarism, fake content - before they experience it as a useful tool. So it's just making many people's lives slightly worse from the outset, at least for now Add all that on top of the issues the OP raises and you can see why so many are have bad feelings about it

crassus_ed 8mo ago

Nice read! The main benefit for me is the reduced search times for anything I need to look up online. Especially for code you can find relevant information ware more quickly. One improvement for your writing style: it was clear to me that you don’t hate AI though, you didn’t have to mention that so many times in your story.

phoebusaicartel 8mo ago

The Phoebus.AI cartel was an international cartel that controlled the manufacture and sale of computer components in much of Europe and North America between 2025 and 2039. The cartel took over market territories and lowered the useful supply and life of such computer components, which is commonly cited as an example of planned obsolescence of general computing technology in favor of 6G ubiquitous computing. The Phoebus.AI cartel's compact was intended to expire in 2055, but it was instead nullified in 2040 after World War III made coordination among the members impossible.

SilentM68 8mo ago

That's excellent article. I also don't believe AI is the issue, but rather those that are at the helm of most of these companies. In my view, AI Companies like other tech companies of the past have no interest in serving society. So, you have a point when you said, "They don’t actually care about what their products may do to society—they just want to be sure they win the AI race, damn the consequences." It's all about money, and those at the top that have the money, have nothing to lose. I'd rather see AI being put to better use, curing cancer, other diseases. I think your scenario where, "Their Super-AGI will write the UBI law, and get it passed, when it has a few minutes between curing cancer and building a warp drive," is very likely now.

thothless 8mo ago

I'm still confused on how so many people are happy paying so much money, just to BE the product. Widespread FOMO and the irrationality that comes with it might be at an all time high.

lukev 8mo ago

I think the author is far too generous in thinking through the possible motives of tech leaders in the "what if they believe it?" branch. Far from embracing UBI (or any other legal/social strategy to mitigate mass unemployment), tech leaders have signaled very strongly that they'd actually prefer the exact opposite. They have nearly universally aligned themselves with the party that's explicitly in favor of extreme wealth inequality and aversion to even the mildest social welfare program.

renewiltord 8mo ago

Highly entertaining to me that people will form these Woe Is Me rings and just hype themselves into sadness. Then you give them a few minutes and they’ll start exclaiming about how society is all about loneliness these days and how they’ve been going to therapy for the last five years. The miserable have always been miserable. And no matter how much the world improves, they will find paths to misery. Perhaps the great lesson of this age is that some revel in sadness. Perhaps what we desire as humans is intensity of emotion more than valence.

skeledrew 8mo ago

> The idea of AI as an exterminator of human problems is much more appealing than AI as the exterminator of, you know, the career of me and everybody else on Earth. Here's the rub though: needing a "career" to survive and have a decent life is a human problem. It's an extreme case of mass Stockholm Syndrome that's made the majority accept that working in order to make money in order to have access to life-preserving/enhancing resources is a necessary part of the human condition. Really, that flow is only relevant when it requires human effort to create, maintain and distribute those resources in the first place. AI is increasingly taking over the effort, and so is threatening that socio-economic order. The real problem is that the gains are still being locked away to maintain that scarcity which the efforts address, so over time there's an increasing crises of access, since there's nothing really in place to continue providing the controlled access everyone in the system has had to resources for... centuries.

mfrankel 8mo ago

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queenkjuul 8mo ago

> unless all those AI marketing materials are really meant for the ultra-wealthy, and not for me The only reason they exist is because rich people keep shoveling money into their furnaces. 800M free ChatGPT users do nothing for nobody, Sam A couldn't care less about them, the only people that matter to AI companies, and i mean matter at all, are investors. And every thing they do is about appealing to investors.

lasgawe 8mo ago

Is this article written by AI?

ModernMech 8mo ago

> ANd Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, “kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people”. Odd typo + em dash = "Make mistakes in your output so that people think it wasn't AI generated"

NM-Super 8mo ago
Author here! I didn’t use AI to write this. Jekyll’s markdown to HTML converter helpfully transforms a series of three normal dashes into an em dash. I did use AI to proofread the article, and implemented its primary suggestion (turning down a dark joke at my own expense that was pretty out of place), but the first draft of this was 100% hand-written.

orwin 8mo ago

Despite having a very good life, i always had trouble with self-esteem and always felt the impostor syndrome and not having really earned what i have (both professionally and personally. AI users and especially AI boosters are the best thing that happened to me. I no longer felt as an impostor, maybe the opposite. The confidence they gave me got me a promotion and a raise. I still get mad at AI sometime, when someone use it to resolve an easy issue tagged "good first issue" i especially took time to describe for a new hire to enter a very complex codebase, or when i review a fully vibe-coded PR before the person who vibe-coded it, but overall the coming of AI (especially since Sonnet/Opus4.5 and GPT 5.1) is great.

bitwize 8mo ago

The AI bubble is almost exactly like Theranos. I honestly believe that Elizabeth Holmes believed in what she was doing, and that if she strung investors along for long enough, she could fund the development of her magical nanofluidic CGM on steroids. She didn't have the knowledge to pull it off, nor to know that everybody else was far from pulling it off, and she Dunning-Kruger'd herself into a situation where the jig was up and she was caught. The difference is, with AI, it looks like they're really pulling it together and delivering something. For years it was "any minute now, this is gonna change everything, keep giving us money please" and it was all amusing but not-worth-the-hassle chatbots until recently, but Professor Harold Hill came through in the clutch and put together a band that can play something resembling music at the latest possible moment. And now we have agents that can do real work and the distinct possibility that the hermetic magicians might actually awaken their electronic god.

thefz 8mo ago

Nothing to say about the article which is well written, and I sort of agree with it, but what's up with the US being enamored with "vibe"-anything? Can we stop using the word unnecesarily (along with "x energy"), please? It sounds deeply stupid.

w0de0 8mo ago

> Not a Hater Nor am I, but… > Earlier today I was asking Gemini to find me a nearby bar that would optimize for price, tastiness of drinks, and “not making me feel lonely as a solo traveler on Valentine’s day.” …this sort of behavior I don’t believe I understand. It seems a silly abdication of living one’s own life. Here’s a poem from just me. — Choose a bar, ye human. Confront your loneliness if you must. Or flee. Wander a bit. Do a bar crawl. Take up smoking. Get wasted; be buzzed; abstain; wander, do a bit; fail to optimize - for at least one opalescent moment - if not, goddamn, why be?

w0de0 8mo ago

Perhaps wise, when reading these comments, to 's/{people,others,friends,those that}/I/g' Interestingly 's/they/AI/g' almost works.