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It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any po

by derac 4mo ago

It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a part of themselves that is beyond nature and has a "special" place in the universe. According to Google Wikipedia still gets 4 billion pageviews a month. The article seems a bit hyperbolic. There are certainly concerns around the nature of work and the economy, though. There are of course ongoing concerns about global warming. I'm not denying that, but I don't think it's particular to AI tech.

ambicapter 4mo ago
Part of the hate surrounding AI is that it is being sold as AI, but it really, really isn't the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago.
- nerdsniper 4mo ago
  When I was a kid, “AI” was quake 2 bots, starcraft pathfinding algorithms, and chessbot personalities. I dont understand why the old definition of AI keeps being retconned.
  - lazide 4mo ago
    Branding. LLM’s (as a term!) are too specific for the ‘conquer the world’ narratives the VCs want to justify the high valuations. Machine Learning sounds too technical. AI is pithy, and can be anything from skynet to… skynet. Or clippy, technically, but everyone seems to have forgotten about him. FOMO drives the valuation, and the more vagueness and ambiguity you can have, the easier it is to stoke it. And if the option is being part owner of a world conquering, game changing tech - or a victim - which would you choose?
    - marcosdumay 4mo ago
      I really like the idea of AI being the brand of whatever we are hyping so much that will inevitably fail spectacularly and turn the entire society against it for a couple of decades. The name basically means anything a computer can do, and has meant almost anything a computer does at some point. So it's not a very useful word anyway, no loss in letting marketers use it to whatever Tormentus Nexus they are working towards.
      - joquarky 4mo ago
        As an aside: why have we allowed marketing people to take over?
        marcosdumay 4mo ago
        The marketing people didn't take over. Some self-aggrandizing self-destroying billionaires did. I'm not sure why we allowed it, but they have been working on it for more than 50 years. My best guess is that they just kept insisting on it until people lost attention for an instant, and then did it again, and again.
        queenkjuul 4mo ago
        Unfortunately the West has yet to have their socialist revolutions
        marcosdumay 4mo ago
        What's "the West"? UK an Germany practically invented the concept, and the US practically wrote the manual on how to make a welfare state.
        queenkjuul 4mo ago
        Hilarious
  - gobdovan 4mo ago
    IQ tests are restandardised from time to time. We could take the scores from 100 years ago and see that everybody would be gifted. Intelligence is usually defined as the skill in pursuing a goal, or speed of acquiring the ability for pursuing given goal. Given the goal-dependent nature, it's not that useful to use the same tests and measurements for intelligence over time, be it artificial or not.
    - bvfthnvxxdgbnk 4mo ago
      [dead]
    - gobdovan 4mo ago
      [0] JR Flynn: The mean IQ of Americans: Massive gains 1932 to 1978. [1] Legg, S., Hutter, M.: A collection of definitions of intelligence [2] François Chollet, On the Measure of Intelligence
    - skeledrew 4mo ago
      So it's an ever-shifting goalpost, which makes it pretty useless as an objective.
      - gobdovan 4mo ago
        Yeah, but there's attempts to fix it. The Cholet paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547 https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547) is a good attempt, shifting from measuring ~skill to measuring ~acquiring skill. It's the framework behind ARC-AGI benchmarks.
  - joquarky 4mo ago
    Many people can't abide being something other than the center of the universe, and they get antsy when something might challenge that "unique" position. Imagine if we had social media during the flip from geocentrism.
  - pixl97 4mo ago
    >old definition of AI There was never any old definition AI that limited it to such a tiny set of capabilities. AI is controversial because the term intelligent is controversial and covers so much.
  - bmacho 4mo ago
    You are very wrong here. The term "AI" never meant bots in general. It's true that in games bots were also called AI but only in a specific context and niche, and it is not what the whole conversation is about.
- SoftTalker 4mo ago
  Yes. We were supposed to have the Star Trek post-scarcity economy, whereas what we're getting is layoffs, rent-seeking and wealth extraction at every turn, complete loss of personal privacy, everything getting more expensive, and no hope for the future. Meanwhile I'm still washing and folding my clothes every week.
  - ryandrake 4mo ago
    An optimist can hope AI and robotics brings us into a post-scarcity world and that society responds with utopia rather than just disposing of the 99% of people who become economically irrelevant. History has a pessimistic vibe though.
    - skeledrew 4mo ago
      A pessimist would preempt the disposal of that 99% by ensuring the 1% doesn't monopolize AI and robotics. By whatever means necessary.
    - senordevnyc 4mo ago
      History has the most optimistic vibe imaginable, what are you talking about?? Look at where we are as a species right now, vs century ago, a millennium ago, ten thousand years ago! What period of history would you want your children to be born into, with zero control over where or who they’d be born to? Just a random person on the earth on a date you choose, what would be your choice?
      - ryandrake 4mo ago
        There is none, and that’s my point. Despite technological advances throughout history that made things easier to do and less scarce, over and over we keep the scarcity mindset and winner-takes-most economics around, funneling the majority of the value and benefits up to the few. At every point when some advancement could have greatly improved everyone’s lot in life, humanity chose to spread that improvement around to the masses as thinly as possible, just enough to avoid social upheaval, and shipped the rest of the value into the pockets of the richest 1%.
- beering 4mo ago
  Is it not? You can talk to it in plain English and it can do things for you and respond back in a synthesized voice. I was reading an old Asimov short story about a guy who comes across a lost robot and has to trick it into staying put, and it felt weirdly prescient. (The story is “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray”)
  - bvfthnvxxdgbnk 4mo ago
    [dead]
  - newaccountman2 4mo ago
    It's not really "intelligence" It's just the mimicry thereof. I probably fall into the "pro-AI" camp if we want to divide things along the binary, but it's pretty facile to consider this software to possess or represent "intelligence" IMO.
    - the13 4mo ago
      Agree, you're technically correct, and AI it's solving Erdos problems, even if we don't know exactly how or why. More mech interp & other research will help. https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2060451757818601808 https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2060451757818601808
    - skeledrew 4mo ago
      Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have. And of course we continue to have the same vision now that X won't be possible for a great many years, if ever. And we also continually carefully refine the generally accepted definition of "intelligence" so that it specifically excludes whatever the current capabilities are, so we can indefinitely continue to say "this isn't intelligence".
      - newaccountman2 4mo ago
        > Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have. I agree with that, but I don't think anyone is moving the goalposts as you imply later in your post.
- bananaflag 4mo ago
  What do you mean? It's exactly what every child has read in the past 80 years: you can talk to the computer and it does intellectual work like math or coding or writing stories.
- YoukaiCountry 4mo ago
  If you could show people 20 years ago what we have now, I have no doubt most people would have considered it AI. We can have actual conversations with our computers, they can now interact with tools they are provided, and act in a reasonably intelligent manner for a great many tasks. 20-year-ago-me would have barely been able to believe it. Is this sort of stance that this "isn't AI" missing the forest for the trees?
  - mooreds 4mo ago
    > We can have actual conversations with our computers, Not just computers, but documents! It's amazing to be able to paste in a few RFCs and then interrogate the documents to get a better understanding of them. It is truly an amazing time we live in. I get the worries and fear too, but it is still amazing.
  - yallpendantools 4mo ago
    I think it's not so much the technical scope that makes it "not the AI you read of as a child" but the societal impact. AI/robots/automation was supposed to usher in some kind of techno-utopia for all the good and bad that it entails. Cue the quote about AI supposedly about taking over the boring tasks so we can spend more time making art, achieving self-actualization. The AI you read of as a child (speaking for myself, coming from a lot of 80s sci-fi stories) is not all good of course; that's where most of the plot's conflict comes from. But LLMs, for a lot of people, are more burdened with the downsides sci-fi stories warned us about with very little, if any, of the advantages. And speaking of forests for the trees, you zoom out a bit more and see that this AI hype train is following a years-long trend of SV being exposed for its moral failings. We have repeatedly shown, as an industry, that we missed the point of the literature we so love to quote. From the concept of "meritocracy" to naming a company "Palantir". The AI hype is not an isolated incident. We love to quote Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park but it's all rhetoric---we don't really ask ourselves that question!
    - xg15 4mo ago
      Maybe also whether AI is a "person" or not? A prominent theme of AI in fiction was discussion whether an AI can have a consciousness, can be considered to be an individual, etc - with author and reader usually being on the "yes, they are a person" side. Even if not, interesting AIs were at least interesting characters in a story sense (e.g. C3P0). Now we're dealing with effectively the opposite - something that looks and behaves like a person but is decidedly not one. If you grew up with all the scifi about sympathetic (or at least charismatic) AI characters, this is probably sobering.
- elxr 4mo ago
  That has to be the silliest reason to hate AI I've seen yet, next to the "don't you know how many gallons of water are being used up!!!" Replace "AI" in that sentence with any rapidly evolving tech: social networks, smart homes, digital governments, hell - even online shopping. The versions of any of those things a child would've read 20 years ago won't have anywhere near the complexities and unexpected downsides all those things ended up having in real life. 20 years ago, AI to (kid) me was a real life C3PO, or an npc in an open-world game that existed in that world with their own motivation and story independent of what you did. Or the stereotypical humanoid robot with consciousness like in the film "A.I.". No kid could've imagined vibe coding, running sub-agents, diffusion models, AI zombies, and all this other stuff we have today. Everything you imagined as a child is still possible, and depending on what exactly you read, is already here. Yeah the UX is different than what anyone 20 years ago would've predicted, but how does this mean the "hate" make sense? That's not even 0.1% of the reason the typical anti-AI people are against AI.
qsera 4mo ago
>I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago... I have been too, but LLMs aint it, just like mobile phones is not subspace communicator...
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
bensyverson 4mo ago
Nuance was banned from the internet circa 1996, sorry
thewebguyd 4mo ago
> you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now. Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob. Trying to stand up for your right to a safe public space brands you as evil. There's no room for a middle ground or nuance anymore. You are either entirely in one tribe, or entirely out.
- michaelt 4mo ago
  > Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob. Are you having these conversations about politics in person? Or are these conversations happening on Twitter/Reddit/HN/whatever? In my experience, online forums don't really work for political discussion for a bunch of reasons. If you change to getting your fix of politics from long-form articles and radio-style scripted podcasts by professional journalists, you'll probably find there's a lot more room for nuance.
  - bluefirebrand 4mo ago
    > Are you having these conversations in person? I can't speak for the other poster but I've had the experience they described in-person, when I was living in Victoria I rented an apartment downtown Victoria and had pretty frequent run-ins with addicts on the streets. My friends who lived and worked further out away from the downtown core had very strong opinions about it any time I had anything negative to say about the experiences
    - intended 4mo ago
      However your experience isn't necessarily where the other poster is coming from. As a counter point, I have more nuanced conversations in person and am able to do it online; however I have also moderated a community for several years and learned how to do it. From what I can remember of research, is that there is a difference in how people express themselves online vs offline.
BoorishBears 4mo ago
> The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a part of themselves that is beyond nature and has a "special" place in the universe. This is actually a big part of why being pro-AI is met with negativity today. As someone who's using and building with AI and also experiences the "anti" movement, you've chosen a pretty condescending minority of the reasons why they dislike AI and painted it as the default. "They never liked AI because they don't like the idea maybe they're not such special snowflakes in the universe"... really? They didn't "always hate AI". Most people didn't even think of AI outside of niche things like self-driving. Instead their hatred is from LLMs and generative AI which (as far as they're concerned) didn't exist until November 30, 2022. Actual reasons they readily share for not liking it are things like: - it was built by abusing copyright (true with nuance) - it's used to generate massive amounts of low value content that's overwhelming their spaces (very true) - it's having an environmental impact (true with more nuance) - it's making the things they want to buy more expensive (true, even things unrelated to AI) - the loudest voices in the room have spent years telling them this could destroy humanity and/or take all their jobs (completely true) - it's behind major layoffs (true with nuance around stated reasons vs actual) - people who are pro-AI have a strong tendency to minimize their reasons for hating it (... obviously true) I mean even if you like AI, it's clear we're at a place with so many reasons for people to be anti-AI that it's honestly an own goal at this point. People didn't have opinions about generative AI as it exists today 20 years ago. The idea of a computer being able to turn any topic into a haiku would have been contentious for if it was possible, not if it was good: that sounds great! But now we got it and it came with way more baggage than any of them ever imagined. They didn't think it'd learn to write haikus by ripping through every written word. And they didn't think it'd be used to write lots of spam instead of haikus once it could. And they didn't think the same capability would generalize to typing in an artist's name and spitting out infinitely remixed copies of their work. - I think moving forward in a less negative direction starts with being real about why people hate AI, and it's a lot less "it makes me feel less special" than it is "it's actively reducing my quality of life" for people outside of the bubble.
- derac 4mo ago
  I wasn't trying to be condescending. I was stating my experience talking to people 10-20 years ago, before AI was thought about at all by people outside of tech. It always boiled down to a dualist vs monist ontology argument. I agree there are valid reasons to dislike current generative AI tech though. I agree with a lot of this. I should say I do think that deeper ontological thing is why people tend to think the tech will always be a novelty or will stagnate soon, etc.
j45 4mo ago
The nuanced takes of tech haven't been welcome for other tech as well.
Deebster 4mo ago
Last year Wikipedia reported an 8% drop in humans traffic[1]. That's huge. [1] https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wikipedia/ https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik...
w29UiIm2Xz 4mo ago
No technology will have me "excited" if the prospect is lower/no compensation and poorer working conditions. I concur on the nuance -- I use it as a tool at work. I see value in it. I see business value in it displacing me, even if that's not the maximally correct position because some higher up did some numeric calculations. The first prompt I got a decent reply to was a thrill. Then the thinking of the second-order effects kicked in.
- tptacek 4mo ago
  Just as long as you understand that this is how everybody else not in technology, from accountants to East Coast dockworkers and all points in between, have felt about everything we do in this field for the past 50 years. It's awfully tough to adopt a morally rigorous position about "lower compensation" when you're literally in the business of automating jobs away.
  - w29UiIm2Xz 4mo ago
    Those people could've traded up. And plenty of people in the trades have done that. But now, it is not obvious what 'trading up' in this situation is. There was optionality: upskill and increase your compensation. Now, there may be no opportunity to upskill. And that is a meaningfully different environment. The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living (and many of us still do so) -- we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training.
    - SoftTalker 4mo ago
      Ironically, the trades are now desperate for smart people who show up as scheduled and sober. Upskilling might be learning to be a plumber or electrician or carpenter.
    - phil21 4mo ago
      > Those people could've traded up. And plenty of people in the trades have done that. This is precisely the karma that is coming to us as a group. Because of this sort of stuff. No, a 50 year old trade worker cannot "trade up" in any realistic sense. That's idiotic on it's face. And that also ignores that many folks don't want to trade up because they get satisfaction in what they do - just like some tech workers do. Man of those folks also had moral and ethical reasons to not want to join an industry assisting in putting their friends and family out of work. > The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living AKA automating other jobs away in many (perhaps most?) cases. Either directly or indirectly. These line-of-business applications tend to be automation of some sort which reduces manual labor. Be it on the factory floor, enabling that factory to be outsourced to China, or just making "paperwork" more efficient putting an office full of secretaries out of a job. Or working in some ad-tech enabled field which put entire industries out of work altogether. > we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training. Factory workers, skilled machinists, tool and die manufacturers, secretaries, accountants, journalists - effectively an infinite list - did not contribute to the IT over the past 30 years that replaced them either. That's the point being made in this sub-thread. But hey, you could always pivot your career to be a plumber, roofer, or electrician! While I'm certainly going to be part of the targeted group, I can't really say I'll be surprised at the working class laughing at us and enjoying IT folks getting their comeuppance. I haven't found a way to articulate my thoughts very well on this subject, others do it better even on HN. But coming from a working class family with most of my old school friends from growing up still working blue collar jobs - I can say it's been incredibly uncomfortable listening to the narratives from tech workers on these subjects for 25 years. It's been utterly amazing to me how people switched on a dime within a couple years on the subject now that their livelihoods are on the line. The calls for free markets, pro-automation, "just learn to code", anti-regulation, etc. all instantly changed the moment such folks had even a trivial amount of similar pressure put on them.
intended 4mo ago
> According to Google Wikipedia still gets 4 billion pageviews a month. > But it seems the online encyclopedia is not completely immune to broader trends, with human page views falling 8% year-over-year, https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/18/wikipedia-says-traffic-is-falling-due-to-ai-search-summaries-and-social-video/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/18/wikipedia-says-traffic-is-...
strueman 4mo ago
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- deleted 4mo ago
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agentultra 4mo ago
> There are of course ongoing concerns about global warming. I'm not denying that, but I don't think it's particular to AI tech. Ok so you’re not denying the impact on climate change. Any of the other negative impacts it has on society? Don’t sweep them under the rug and say, “works for me though so that’s worth it, not a big deal.” I think the maths is interesting and the research is fascinating. I like computers, programming, and theoretical computer science more perhaps than the average person. That doesn’t mean I’m happy with data centres relying on illegal methane power plants to generate their base load power requirements. I think it’s unethical… and illegal. It seems like regulators are either unable to keep up or are getting paid to not look. That’s unethical. The financial systems used to deploy these data centres are imploding in debt and should also be regulated. They’re going to poison a bunch of retirement funds and could be a major factor in the crash of US bonds. Unethical. If they can’t run a profitable business even when they are bending and cheating and causing all of this harm I don’t think there’s any reason they shouldn’t be left to crash and burn like anyone else. I don’t have much sympathy for the position of, “yeah that stuff is bad but I like it anyway and don’t want to talk about it.” You might find more common ground with people if you can recognize the harms it does do, acknowledge that they are bad and advocate for change. And you might have to give up the idea that any of this technology is going to lead to the creation of science-fiction super intelligent beings. We know what the combination of attention, transformers, and RNN can do. Pretty nifty stuff… but is it worth bleeding an economy of all its resources so that you can simulate f within psi worth it? I don’t think so. Sometimes the answer is, yeah neat but who cares? I’d rather have energy for keeping my cooling on in the middle of this heat wave.
- s1artibartfast 4mo ago
  That is a big differentiator. I think there is a pretty valid argument that the models and data centers are net positive for society, and therefore ethical (better than the counterfactual of their absence). I agree that there are some harms, but they are mostly self imposed. If a retirement fund gambles people's money on the wrong company, that is on them. Most of the power conflicts are downstream of corrupt politicians and ignorant voters strangling their grid and stymieing efforts to improve production and transmission.
duxup 4mo ago
I find people in person are pretty welcoming of nuanced opinions. Online if people even smell something they don’t like… it goes bad fast.
oulipo2 4mo ago
I don't think the AI criticism has anything to do with "thinking we are beyond nature or whatever". It's the realization that this force will only drive societies apart even more Noticed how the proponents of AI are the Musk, Thiel, Palantir, and other, who have wet dreams about authoritarianism, control, and subjuging minorities? Don't you think there's a reason for this?
indemnity 4mo ago
Try mentioning AI in a remotely positive light on Mastodon, e.g. just as a side comment about how it let you finally finish a side project or something cool, and you’ll get a wave of neckbeards swarm in to tell you they are blocking you, you are a bad person, killing the earth, fascist supporter, etc. Very strange, but I’ve seen the same folks dog pile in for other causes, so I guess it’s just a part of the identity now.

by derac 4mo ago

ambicapter 4mo ago

Part of the hate surrounding AI is that it is being sold as AI, but it really, really isn't the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago.

nerdsniper 4mo ago
When I was a kid, “AI” was quake 2 bots, starcraft pathfinding algorithms, and chessbot personalities. I dont understand why the old definition of AI keeps being retconned.
- lazide 4mo ago
  Branding. LLM’s (as a term!) are too specific for the ‘conquer the world’ narratives the VCs want to justify the high valuations. Machine Learning sounds too technical. AI is pithy, and can be anything from skynet to… skynet. Or clippy, technically, but everyone seems to have forgotten about him. FOMO drives the valuation, and the more vagueness and ambiguity you can have, the easier it is to stoke it. And if the option is being part owner of a world conquering, game changing tech - or a victim - which would you choose?
  - marcosdumay 4mo ago
    I really like the idea of AI being the brand of whatever we are hyping so much that will inevitably fail spectacularly and turn the entire society against it for a couple of decades. The name basically means anything a computer can do, and has meant almost anything a computer does at some point. So it's not a very useful word anyway, no loss in letting marketers use it to whatever Tormentus Nexus they are working towards.
    - joquarky 4mo ago
      As an aside: why have we allowed marketing people to take over?
      - marcosdumay 4mo ago
        The marketing people didn't take over. Some self-aggrandizing self-destroying billionaires did. I'm not sure why we allowed it, but they have been working on it for more than 50 years. My best guess is that they just kept insisting on it until people lost attention for an instant, and then did it again, and again.
      - queenkjuul 4mo ago
        Unfortunately the West has yet to have their socialist revolutions
        marcosdumay 4mo ago
        What's "the West"? UK an Germany practically invented the concept, and the US practically wrote the manual on how to make a welfare state.
        queenkjuul 4mo ago
        Hilarious
- gobdovan 4mo ago
  IQ tests are restandardised from time to time. We could take the scores from 100 years ago and see that everybody would be gifted. Intelligence is usually defined as the skill in pursuing a goal, or speed of acquiring the ability for pursuing given goal. Given the goal-dependent nature, it's not that useful to use the same tests and measurements for intelligence over time, be it artificial or not.
  - bvfthnvxxdgbnk 4mo ago
    [dead]
  - gobdovan 4mo ago
    [0] JR Flynn: The mean IQ of Americans: Massive gains 1932 to 1978. [1] Legg, S., Hutter, M.: A collection of definitions of intelligence [2] François Chollet, On the Measure of Intelligence
  - skeledrew 4mo ago
    So it's an ever-shifting goalpost, which makes it pretty useless as an objective.
    - gobdovan 4mo ago
      Yeah, but there's attempts to fix it. The Cholet paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547 https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547) is a good attempt, shifting from measuring ~skill to measuring ~acquiring skill. It's the framework behind ARC-AGI benchmarks.
- joquarky 4mo ago
  Many people can't abide being something other than the center of the universe, and they get antsy when something might challenge that "unique" position. Imagine if we had social media during the flip from geocentrism.
- pixl97 4mo ago
  >old definition of AI There was never any old definition AI that limited it to such a tiny set of capabilities. AI is controversial because the term intelligent is controversial and covers so much.
- bmacho 4mo ago
  You are very wrong here. The term "AI" never meant bots in general. It's true that in games bots were also called AI but only in a specific context and niche, and it is not what the whole conversation is about.
SoftTalker 4mo ago
Yes. We were supposed to have the Star Trek post-scarcity economy, whereas what we're getting is layoffs, rent-seeking and wealth extraction at every turn, complete loss of personal privacy, everything getting more expensive, and no hope for the future. Meanwhile I'm still washing and folding my clothes every week.
- ryandrake 4mo ago
  An optimist can hope AI and robotics brings us into a post-scarcity world and that society responds with utopia rather than just disposing of the 99% of people who become economically irrelevant. History has a pessimistic vibe though.
  - skeledrew 4mo ago
    A pessimist would preempt the disposal of that 99% by ensuring the 1% doesn't monopolize AI and robotics. By whatever means necessary.
  - senordevnyc 4mo ago
    History has the most optimistic vibe imaginable, what are you talking about?? Look at where we are as a species right now, vs century ago, a millennium ago, ten thousand years ago! What period of history would you want your children to be born into, with zero control over where or who they’d be born to? Just a random person on the earth on a date you choose, what would be your choice?
    - ryandrake 4mo ago
      There is none, and that’s my point. Despite technological advances throughout history that made things easier to do and less scarce, over and over we keep the scarcity mindset and winner-takes-most economics around, funneling the majority of the value and benefits up to the few. At every point when some advancement could have greatly improved everyone’s lot in life, humanity chose to spread that improvement around to the masses as thinly as possible, just enough to avoid social upheaval, and shipped the rest of the value into the pockets of the richest 1%.
beering 4mo ago
Is it not? You can talk to it in plain English and it can do things for you and respond back in a synthesized voice. I was reading an old Asimov short story about a guy who comes across a lost robot and has to trick it into staying put, and it felt weirdly prescient. (The story is “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray”)
- bvfthnvxxdgbnk 4mo ago
  [dead]
- newaccountman2 4mo ago
  It's not really "intelligence" It's just the mimicry thereof. I probably fall into the "pro-AI" camp if we want to divide things along the binary, but it's pretty facile to consider this software to possess or represent "intelligence" IMO.
  - the13 4mo ago
    Agree, you're technically correct, and AI it's solving Erdos problems, even if we don't know exactly how or why. More mech interp & other research will help. https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2060451757818601808 https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2060451757818601808
  - skeledrew 4mo ago
    Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have. And of course we continue to have the same vision now that X won't be possible for a great many years, if ever. And we also continually carefully refine the generally accepted definition of "intelligence" so that it specifically excludes whatever the current capabilities are, so we can indefinitely continue to say "this isn't intelligence".
    - newaccountman2 4mo ago
      > Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have. I agree with that, but I don't think anyone is moving the goalposts as you imply later in your post.
bananaflag 4mo ago
What do you mean? It's exactly what every child has read in the past 80 years: you can talk to the computer and it does intellectual work like math or coding or writing stories.
YoukaiCountry 4mo ago
If you could show people 20 years ago what we have now, I have no doubt most people would have considered it AI. We can have actual conversations with our computers, they can now interact with tools they are provided, and act in a reasonably intelligent manner for a great many tasks. 20-year-ago-me would have barely been able to believe it. Is this sort of stance that this "isn't AI" missing the forest for the trees?
- mooreds 4mo ago
  > We can have actual conversations with our computers, Not just computers, but documents! It's amazing to be able to paste in a few RFCs and then interrogate the documents to get a better understanding of them. It is truly an amazing time we live in. I get the worries and fear too, but it is still amazing.
- yallpendantools 4mo ago
  I think it's not so much the technical scope that makes it "not the AI you read of as a child" but the societal impact. AI/robots/automation was supposed to usher in some kind of techno-utopia for all the good and bad that it entails. Cue the quote about AI supposedly about taking over the boring tasks so we can spend more time making art, achieving self-actualization. The AI you read of as a child (speaking for myself, coming from a lot of 80s sci-fi stories) is not all good of course; that's where most of the plot's conflict comes from. But LLMs, for a lot of people, are more burdened with the downsides sci-fi stories warned us about with very little, if any, of the advantages. And speaking of forests for the trees, you zoom out a bit more and see that this AI hype train is following a years-long trend of SV being exposed for its moral failings. We have repeatedly shown, as an industry, that we missed the point of the literature we so love to quote. From the concept of "meritocracy" to naming a company "Palantir". The AI hype is not an isolated incident. We love to quote Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park but it's all rhetoric---we don't really ask ourselves that question!
  - xg15 4mo ago
    Maybe also whether AI is a "person" or not? A prominent theme of AI in fiction was discussion whether an AI can have a consciousness, can be considered to be an individual, etc - with author and reader usually being on the "yes, they are a person" side. Even if not, interesting AIs were at least interesting characters in a story sense (e.g. C3P0). Now we're dealing with effectively the opposite - something that looks and behaves like a person but is decidedly not one. If you grew up with all the scifi about sympathetic (or at least charismatic) AI characters, this is probably sobering.
elxr 4mo ago
That has to be the silliest reason to hate AI I've seen yet, next to the "don't you know how many gallons of water are being used up!!!" Replace "AI" in that sentence with any rapidly evolving tech: social networks, smart homes, digital governments, hell - even online shopping. The versions of any of those things a child would've read 20 years ago won't have anywhere near the complexities and unexpected downsides all those things ended up having in real life. 20 years ago, AI to (kid) me was a real life C3PO, or an npc in an open-world game that existed in that world with their own motivation and story independent of what you did. Or the stereotypical humanoid robot with consciousness like in the film "A.I.". No kid could've imagined vibe coding, running sub-agents, diffusion models, AI zombies, and all this other stuff we have today. Everything you imagined as a child is still possible, and depending on what exactly you read, is already here. Yeah the UX is different than what anyone 20 years ago would've predicted, but how does this mean the "hate" make sense? That's not even 0.1% of the reason the typical anti-AI people are against AI.

qsera 4mo ago

>I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago... I have been too, but LLMs aint it, just like mobile phones is not subspace communicator...

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bensyverson 4mo ago

Nuance was banned from the internet circa 1996, sorry

thewebguyd 4mo ago

> you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now. Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob. Trying to stand up for your right to a safe public space brands you as evil. There's no room for a middle ground or nuance anymore. You are either entirely in one tribe, or entirely out.

michaelt 4mo ago
> Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob. Are you having these conversations about politics in person? Or are these conversations happening on Twitter/Reddit/HN/whatever? In my experience, online forums don't really work for political discussion for a bunch of reasons. If you change to getting your fix of politics from long-form articles and radio-style scripted podcasts by professional journalists, you'll probably find there's a lot more room for nuance.
- bluefirebrand 4mo ago
  > Are you having these conversations in person? I can't speak for the other poster but I've had the experience they described in-person, when I was living in Victoria I rented an apartment downtown Victoria and had pretty frequent run-ins with addicts on the streets. My friends who lived and worked further out away from the downtown core had very strong opinions about it any time I had anything negative to say about the experiences
  - intended 4mo ago
    However your experience isn't necessarily where the other poster is coming from. As a counter point, I have more nuanced conversations in person and am able to do it online; however I have also moderated a community for several years and learned how to do it. From what I can remember of research, is that there is a difference in how people express themselves online vs offline.

BoorishBears 4mo ago

> The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a part of themselves that is beyond nature and has a "special" place in the universe. This is actually a big part of why being pro-AI is met with negativity today. As someone who's using and building with AI and also experiences the "anti" movement, you've chosen a pretty condescending minority of the reasons why they dislike AI and painted it as the default. "They never liked AI because they don't like the idea maybe they're not such special snowflakes in the universe"... really? They didn't "always hate AI". Most people didn't even think of AI outside of niche things like self-driving. Instead their hatred is from LLMs and generative AI which (as far as they're concerned) didn't exist until November 30, 2022. Actual reasons they readily share for not liking it are things like: - it was built by abusing copyright (true with nuance) - it's used to generate massive amounts of low value content that's overwhelming their spaces (very true) - it's having an environmental impact (true with more nuance) - it's making the things they want to buy more expensive (true, even things unrelated to AI) - the loudest voices in the room have spent years telling them this could destroy humanity and/or take all their jobs (completely true) - it's behind major layoffs (true with nuance around stated reasons vs actual) - people who are pro-AI have a strong tendency to minimize their reasons for hating it (... obviously true) I mean even if you like AI, it's clear we're at a place with so many reasons for people to be anti-AI that it's honestly an own goal at this point. People didn't have opinions about generative AI as it exists today 20 years ago. The idea of a computer being able to turn any topic into a haiku would have been contentious for if it was possible, not if it was good: that sounds great! But now we got it and it came with way more baggage than any of them ever imagined. They didn't think it'd learn to write haikus by ripping through every written word. And they didn't think it'd be used to write lots of spam instead of haikus once it could. And they didn't think the same capability would generalize to typing in an artist's name and spitting out infinitely remixed copies of their work. - I think moving forward in a less negative direction starts with being real about why people hate AI, and it's a lot less "it makes me feel less special" than it is "it's actively reducing my quality of life" for people outside of the bubble.

derac 4mo ago
I wasn't trying to be condescending. I was stating my experience talking to people 10-20 years ago, before AI was thought about at all by people outside of tech. It always boiled down to a dualist vs monist ontology argument. I agree there are valid reasons to dislike current generative AI tech though. I agree with a lot of this. I should say I do think that deeper ontological thing is why people tend to think the tech will always be a novelty or will stagnate soon, etc.

j45 4mo ago

The nuanced takes of tech haven't been welcome for other tech as well.

Deebster 4mo ago

Last year Wikipedia reported an 8% drop in humans traffic[1]. That's huge. [1] https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wikipedia/ https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik...

w29UiIm2Xz 4mo ago

No technology will have me "excited" if the prospect is lower/no compensation and poorer working conditions. I concur on the nuance -- I use it as a tool at work. I see value in it. I see business value in it displacing me, even if that's not the maximally correct position because some higher up did some numeric calculations. The first prompt I got a decent reply to was a thrill. Then the thinking of the second-order effects kicked in.

tptacek 4mo ago
Just as long as you understand that this is how everybody else not in technology, from accountants to East Coast dockworkers and all points in between, have felt about everything we do in this field for the past 50 years. It's awfully tough to adopt a morally rigorous position about "lower compensation" when you're literally in the business of automating jobs away.
- w29UiIm2Xz 4mo ago
  Those people could've traded up. And plenty of people in the trades have done that. But now, it is not obvious what 'trading up' in this situation is. There was optionality: upskill and increase your compensation. Now, there may be no opportunity to upskill. And that is a meaningfully different environment. The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living (and many of us still do so) -- we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training.
  - SoftTalker 4mo ago
    Ironically, the trades are now desperate for smart people who show up as scheduled and sober. Upskilling might be learning to be a plumber or electrician or carpenter.
  - phil21 4mo ago
    > Those people could've traded up. And plenty of people in the trades have done that. This is precisely the karma that is coming to us as a group. Because of this sort of stuff. No, a 50 year old trade worker cannot "trade up" in any realistic sense. That's idiotic on it's face. And that also ignores that many folks don't want to trade up because they get satisfaction in what they do - just like some tech workers do. Man of those folks also had moral and ethical reasons to not want to join an industry assisting in putting their friends and family out of work. > The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living AKA automating other jobs away in many (perhaps most?) cases. Either directly or indirectly. These line-of-business applications tend to be automation of some sort which reduces manual labor. Be it on the factory floor, enabling that factory to be outsourced to China, or just making "paperwork" more efficient putting an office full of secretaries out of a job. Or working in some ad-tech enabled field which put entire industries out of work altogether. > we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training. Factory workers, skilled machinists, tool and die manufacturers, secretaries, accountants, journalists - effectively an infinite list - did not contribute to the IT over the past 30 years that replaced them either. That's the point being made in this sub-thread. But hey, you could always pivot your career to be a plumber, roofer, or electrician! While I'm certainly going to be part of the targeted group, I can't really say I'll be surprised at the working class laughing at us and enjoying IT folks getting their comeuppance. I haven't found a way to articulate my thoughts very well on this subject, others do it better even on HN. But coming from a working class family with most of my old school friends from growing up still working blue collar jobs - I can say it's been incredibly uncomfortable listening to the narratives from tech workers on these subjects for 25 years. It's been utterly amazing to me how people switched on a dime within a couple years on the subject now that their livelihoods are on the line. The calls for free markets, pro-automation, "just learn to code", anti-regulation, etc. all instantly changed the moment such folks had even a trivial amount of similar pressure put on them.

intended 4mo ago

> According to Google Wikipedia still gets 4 billion pageviews a month. > But it seems the online encyclopedia is not completely immune to broader trends, with human page views falling 8% year-over-year, https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/18/wikipedia-says-traffic-is-falling-due-to-ai-search-summaries-and-social-video/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/18/wikipedia-says-traffic-is-...

strueman 4mo ago

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agentultra 4mo ago

> There are of course ongoing concerns about global warming. I'm not denying that, but I don't think it's particular to AI tech. Ok so you’re not denying the impact on climate change. Any of the other negative impacts it has on society? Don’t sweep them under the rug and say, “works for me though so that’s worth it, not a big deal.” I think the maths is interesting and the research is fascinating. I like computers, programming, and theoretical computer science more perhaps than the average person. That doesn’t mean I’m happy with data centres relying on illegal methane power plants to generate their base load power requirements. I think it’s unethical… and illegal. It seems like regulators are either unable to keep up or are getting paid to not look. That’s unethical. The financial systems used to deploy these data centres are imploding in debt and should also be regulated. They’re going to poison a bunch of retirement funds and could be a major factor in the crash of US bonds. Unethical. If they can’t run a profitable business even when they are bending and cheating and causing all of this harm I don’t think there’s any reason they shouldn’t be left to crash and burn like anyone else. I don’t have much sympathy for the position of, “yeah that stuff is bad but I like it anyway and don’t want to talk about it.” You might find more common ground with people if you can recognize the harms it does do, acknowledge that they are bad and advocate for change. And you might have to give up the idea that any of this technology is going to lead to the creation of science-fiction super intelligent beings. We know what the combination of attention, transformers, and RNN can do. Pretty nifty stuff… but is it worth bleeding an economy of all its resources so that you can simulate f within psi worth it? I don’t think so. Sometimes the answer is, yeah neat but who cares? I’d rather have energy for keeping my cooling on in the middle of this heat wave.

s1artibartfast 4mo ago
That is a big differentiator. I think there is a pretty valid argument that the models and data centers are net positive for society, and therefore ethical (better than the counterfactual of their absence). I agree that there are some harms, but they are mostly self imposed. If a retirement fund gambles people's money on the wrong company, that is on them. Most of the power conflicts are downstream of corrupt politicians and ignorant voters strangling their grid and stymieing efforts to improve production and transmission.

duxup 4mo ago

I find people in person are pretty welcoming of nuanced opinions. Online if people even smell something they don’t like… it goes bad fast.

oulipo2 4mo ago

I don't think the AI criticism has anything to do with "thinking we are beyond nature or whatever". It's the realization that this force will only drive societies apart even more Noticed how the proponents of AI are the Musk, Thiel, Palantir, and other, who have wet dreams about authoritarianism, control, and subjuging minorities? Don't you think there's a reason for this?

indemnity 4mo ago

Try mentioning AI in a remotely positive light on Mastodon, e.g. just as a side comment about how it let you finally finish a side project or something cool, and you’ll get a wave of neckbeards swarm in to tell you they are blocking you, you are a bad person, killing the earth, fascist supporter, etc. Very strange, but I’ve seen the same folks dog pile in for other causes, so I guess it’s just a part of the identity now.