4 ms·

People have been made to believe by very influential people (dario, sam, elon etc) that AI will replace them. As a result people are getting angry. Who did not

• estearum 4mo ago
  Just because people are angry does not make it false. > Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? Because arms race. Game dynamics and incentive structures don't cease to exist just because someone notices them.
  • dweinus 4mo ago
    All those devs and data scientists and PhDs make a choice though. They could quit and work somewhere else. Even in a tough market their skills are in demand. They choose to work on this every morning.
    • BeetleB 4mo ago
      Sure, they could do that. The outcome wouldn't change, though. If SW devs who worked on ride sharing apps didn't leave, why would you think these folks would? If SW devs who worked on airline ticket search engines didn't leave, why would you think these folks would? And on and on and on. The SW industry has been heavily involved in replacing jobs since its inception.
      • smaudet 4mo ago
        > The SW industry Partly the issue is, it was never the right model. If you write/wrote code, you were a manager. Probably a better one than your "people manager" ever was, but that is/was arguably a different skill. What you managed was extremely technical, more akin to a line manager or an operations manager than a people manager. Which, yes, everyone could not be the manager. Everyone who was not the manager could be quality control (QC), and handle the parts that "only a human" could handle. The problem is, AI fits in nowhere in this equation, rather it throws it out. AI can manage, like any manager it can short circuit it's QC, in pursuit of an arbitrary metric. Even the idea of "human in the loop" is fundamentally flawed - if the human is not at some level the one directing (managing), there is no reason to stop incuding the human, less and less, in the work. AI is not useful to us.
    • malfist 4mo ago
      There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all! (from Mario Savio)
  • smaudet 4mo ago
    > Because arms race. The irony is, they are building their own competitor... Yeah, we get that nobody can trust China/Russia/USA/Shady cabal of too-rich-people, but we stopped the atom bomb because it was MAD (mutually assured destruction). We need a similar treaty to ban any use of AI in this fashion, because all that will happen is creation of weapons that are inevitably turned on their owners. And then, yes, as a coalition, declare war on any country that violates this. I hate to be a proponent for war, but one's coming either way. I'd prefer a relatively peaceful resolution to some of our problems, not a "oh my god the robots have rebelled, and we are losing" scenario.
• dofm 4mo ago
  > People have been made to believe by very influential people (dario, sam, elon etc) that AI will replace them. As a result people are getting angry. Who did not see this coming? Cal Newport calls this "Doom-Trolling" — there was an NYT article, he has talked about it on his youtube channel and there was an actually really great, long discussion with Ed Zitron about it where Ed covered a lot more topic ground than he has been focussed on lately. He makes the case that this fear-based marketing is causing real harm and unnecessary anxiety and is basically despicable.
  • dgellow 4mo ago
    https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-openai-anthropic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-open...
    • dofm 4mo ago
      Thank you!
    • JBlue42 4mo ago
      Also, in discussion with Ed Zitron on the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr6tOIjFXDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr6tOIjFXDs
      • dofm 4mo ago
        Yea, this was good, wasn’t it; quite different from a lot of Ed’s more, er, brassy stuff.
        • JBlue42 4mo ago
          Yes, I prefer the interviews over the monologues most of the time. The good thing about Ed is that it's not just hot air but he backs up arguments with sources and data. Personally, I prefer a little less anger with my coffee lol
          • 4mo ago
• Jtarii 4mo ago
  >Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? There is a lot of money to be made in the destruction of civilisation.
• WarmWash 4mo ago
  >Who did not see this coming? The general vibe of the internet at least for the last 20 years has been "Work sucks, play is fun, give whatever technology minimizes my need to work and maximizes my wealth and free time" All these same guys have also talked about the need for UBI, so they basically have been promising the dream of the liberal internet: No work, free money, do whatever you want in your life. The viability of this dream is pretty debatable, but it definitely checks all the boxes of the internet hivemind as of ~3-4 years ago.
  • sph 4mo ago
    Are vibecoders working less? I don't think so. I've seen people with a dozen Claude windows open, and I'd rather go dig mud than working like that. There is no universe where you can call that programming despite the end product still being source code. The people that have won are not the lazy ones. It's the preppy work-hard-not-smart guys high on ADHD medication that feel like gods having a dozen machines spew out millions of lines of code per day, instead of just sitting on a hammock and thinking the easiest way to achieve the goal, with the least amount of effort. That said, the shift away from 'the best engineer is the lazy engineer' ethos has happened a decade+ ago.
    • WarmWash 4mo ago
      We are likely still in the the early days of AI. We're playing with computers circa 1975 talking about how it will impact humanity.
  • wseqyrku 4mo ago
    On UBI thing, I think it's is a word designed to make people calm down and to feel safe, if they can't find a pathway for the future in their internal dialogues they will go insane. So here, UBI. It's fine.
• Jcampuzano2 4mo ago
  > Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? There is nothing sexy about it. There is nothing cool about it either. This argument alone doesn't really work because literally billions of peoples jobs and livelihoods have been replaced throughout history from the explicit development of technology that replaces the need for human labor. The question should not be whether the technology replaces people by machines, it should be whether it provides a net benefit overall. You could use this argument to say we should have never invented the printing press if you only thought of the people who used to manually transcribe books and documents.
  • beej71 4mo ago
    > The question should not be whether the technology replaces people by machines, it should be whether it provides a net benefit overall I like this framing. But I wish more people would acknowledge that genAI offloads thinking in ways that the printing press, the loom, the calculator, and the computer never did. I find a net benefit to be extremely unlikely, but the devil's in the details. We'd have to define "benefit" and that's already a big kettle of worms.
  • HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago
    Yes, but it's trivially obvious that AI is different from previous technological automation, since with AI it's ALL jobs being automated, starting with white collar ones, not just some narrow segment. What was true with previous automation, that some jobs disappear, but new ones are created in their place, will not be true of AI, because AI is a general purpose technology capable of doing the new jobs it creates just as well as the old ones it displaces.
    • Jcampuzano2 4mo ago
      I agree was going to comment that yes it does feel slightly different because in most cases technology narrowly targeted specific niches at the time, that when replaced could at least in hindsight be seen to likely benefit the majority at the cost of the existing laborers. Whereas in this case most of the top brass of AI do push it as something more akin to "we think this will replace practically all human labor". And without the availability of human labor, at least given the current economic system its hard to see how that'd lead to anything but mass suffering. I do think the argument still holds. If we were able to see it as a net benefit to all, it would still be worth it. Its just that with the level of replacement we're talking about the net benefit would need to be massive (however we define "benefit") The problem is there is plenty of research showing it is still net negative in many cases, especially (in my opinion) when it comes to cognitive ability and early stage development for children/youth. The closest similarity may be the development of the personal computer or something along those lines.
• tengbretson 4mo ago
  > Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? Say, you wouldn't happen to write software for a living, would you?
  • dwa3592 4mo ago
    I do. developed predictive models for health monitoring of large machines and then fraud detection in health care. Why do you ask?
    • tengbretson 4mo ago
      Does automated fraud detection not replace the work of human auditors? Do these large machines automate tasks? If you believe automating human labor is an evil, then I hate to break it to you, your in hell's chatroom. "Software is eating the world" was published 15 years ago. What did you think that meant?
      • dwa3592 4mo ago
        >>Does automated fraud detection not replace the work of human auditors? No. Human auditors use our product. They still make the decision whether something is fraud or not. The product is auditing things that weren't being audited before. Why you might ask. because we didn't know we were supposed to audit that stuff. Multiple investigations revealed new patterns of healthcare fraud and we baked those into our product. Zero auditors were replaced by our product. Millions of dollars of new fraud was caught with our product. >>Do these large machines automate tasks? Yes they do. You are really looking at this in a zero-sum way when it's not.
  • beej71 4mo ago
    Not the GP, but I used to do. And I share the sentiment even though I'm out of the game.
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
• beej71 4mo ago
  I think they just don't care that the people are mad. The equation doesn't include workers. It actively excludes them. Because no sane person would pitch a product that would put you out of work, it seems surprising to us to hear that pitch. But the pitch isn't to us; we're not part of the equation. We're passive listeners between uncaring, unfeeling parties who only value one thing, and that thing ain't us. > The anger against AI/Tech is just starting really. That seems like a pretty safe bet at this point.
  • malfist 4mo ago
    Aside from one health insurance company CEO, why should they care that the common people are angry with them? It doesn't stop them from doing whatever the hell they want. Even if it's illegal (looking at you memphis data center gas generators)
    • mschuster91 4mo ago
      > Aside from one health insurance company CEO, why should they care that the common people are angry with them? Because the frustration builds up. Either we'll see a few more CEOs facing street justice, or we will see candidates getting elected in the primaries that make Sanders and Mamdani combined look like burgeoise (aka, people will actually elect legitimate full on socialists or communists) - and the latter is the actually more dangerous scenario for the ultra rich.
  • ptrhvns 4mo ago
    I know what you're saying about their perspective, but the real equation does include the workers. One possible result of being ignorant of that fact is there could be blood on the streets.
• coef2 4mo ago
  Ironically, developers may turn out to be easier to replace than taxi drivers. We've seen technological progress replaced workers or made certain roles obsolete, and this may become another example. I hope governments and public institutions take a more active role in supporting people going through the transition.
  • justonepost2 4mo ago
    Good to know we can maybe count on the government to send us a few 1000 dollar checks on the way to the human zoo.
    • joquarky 4mo ago
      I'm hoping I get assigned to the nice terrafoam housing that they build before they start drastically cutting corners.
• redsocksfan45 4mo ago
  [dead]
• ben_w 4mo ago
  > Imagine a taxi driver facing his family knowing he will be replaced by a machine fully; imagine that taxi driver thinking that there are slick graduates from top schools who wake up everyday (waymo, tesla, zoox) with one goal in mind - let's automate this taxi driver. Back when self-driving cars still seemed imminent and Musk hadn't started losing his teflon coating, I asked an actual taxi driver his thoughts about self-driving. He was looking forward to it. This surprised me, until I found LLMs were automating coding and found I felt not too different about my own career.
  • HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago
    Presumably your POV depends on whether you believe the capability of AI will somehow stop at coding, so you'll still have your job with a cool new tool, or whether AI will replace your job altogether, in which case perhaps you are planning a career pivot to taxi driver?
• throwmeaway876 4mo ago
  >Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? If they don't do it, others will anyway. >There is nothing sexy about it. There is nothing cool about it either. I disagree. I think it's very cool having machines that can actually talk to you and do stuff better than you. I understand why people are upset since they perceive (justifiably) that their livelihoods are threatened and the CEOs and founders only made it worse by fear-mongering. However, the luddism and denial will always be absurd to me.
• classified 4mo ago
  > There is nothing cool about it either. The "cool" thing about it is that LLM suppliers will own the workforce of the employers who switched so those employers will be at their mercy. Total power, untold profits.
• bvcp 4mo ago
  id rather live in the culture civilisation than the empire of azad