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Well, that's surely worth sacrificing people's livelihood for.

Yes, same as industrial revolution was worth sacrificing people's livelihood, because in the end we are much better off.

Should I take this as you volunteering your livelihood? Otherwise this comment rings incredibly hollow. It's very easy to say others should sacrifice what they've worked their whole life for, but it's not so easy to give it up yourself. If you truly believe it's worth it, though, you should be eager to do so.

> Should I take this as you volunteering your livelihood? Otherwise this comment rings incredibly hollow. It's very easy to say others should sacrifice what they've worked their whole life for, but it's not so easy to give it up yourself. If you truly believe it's worth it, though, you should be eager to do so.

Well yes, I'm not immune to potential displacement, I don't know where did you get it that I'm somehow in safe spot that will never get replaced with AI. And I'm ok with this risk.


Go ahead and quit your job then, if it's worth it. It's for the greater good, after all, and you're more than ok with it.

People losing jobs is price we pay for progress, not goal in itself. I'm really surprised I have to point it out. Hence me quitting my job will have zero positive impact. Programmers for years have automated other jobs and suddenly when their work is in danger somehow automation becomes bad.

It would speed up the "progress" you so desire. But that's about what I'd expect. Turns out people aren't willing to back up what they promote when it negatively affects them, despite all the talk. Maybe trying to sacrifice the lives of millions of people so you can have a fancier chatbot isn't actually a good idea. Next time you suggest destroying society, try it out on yourself first and see if it's really worth it.

> It would speed up the "progress" you so desire.

Wait, how would it do that? I'm genuinely curious.


I really can't see the Steam Machine being a success at this point, if it ever even releases. It seems like they were really banking on hardware steadily getting cheaper like it pretty much always has in the past. A $1000+ Steam Machine makes the PS5 look like a good deal even after the price increases.

Exactly. Not only have the prices gone up, they've gone up for no real reason other than some CEOs are attempting to take over society. The average person isn't even seeing much of the upside of modern technology anymore, just the downsides. Gadgets no longer get cheaper over time, experiences no longer improve over time, and every new startup or innovation seems to be used to make their lives worse, whether directly or indirectly.

The average person does not really benefit from recent AI tech - and the minuscule benefits they may possibly sometimes get are easily outweighed by the negative effects. Say what you will about the morality of bread and circuses, but making them increasingly out of reach seems like a very bad idea to me.


>The average person does not really benefit from recent AI tech

Really? Most people I know seem to have found the chatbots tremendously helpful. It's much faster than researching via a bunch of google searches.


Most people I know don't use chatbots and don't find them helpful.

And can 'most people' even afford most of these services? Having seen some people's spend, even a $200/month plan has me questioning why I'd spend $200/month on Anthropic products when $200/month would be a substantial chunk of my housing as a blue-collar class IT worker just to survive.

You don't need a $200/mo plan, that's for people chewing through Opus tokens with multiple instances of Claude Code going in parallel. My impression is that most people just use the free ChatGPT tier, or $20/mo at most.

For coding or talking to it? $20 is ok to chat I guess. $100 is minimum if you do this for a job.

You are feeding customer/employer code into systems that the customer/employer has not provisioned for you?

If you’re writing software professionally, does the “can’t afford to pay for Claude code” they were talking about apply?

I own an apartment, my heating/electricity/water/internet/repairs costs ~400$/month.

My salary hasn't been increased to pay for this extra helpfullness.

Then use the cheap/free plans?

My time is too valuable to waste it trying to convince AI models to actually work.

>It's much faster than researching via a bunch of google searches.

Ah yes that's certainly worth more than a steady job market, low inflation and affordable goods. Get real.


I think I'm already real? The main reasons for inflation, outside of computer components, are related to the fact that we're near the end of a long-term debt cycle. Look at demographics and monetary/fiscal policy. This is just the scapegoat du jour for long-term structural issues.

Stability in the job market seems to mean stagnation in the long term. That's fine in the short run, but eventually, you're Germany/France and major pillars of your economy are cornered and in trouble. Personally, I think the move is total at-will employment paired with UBI rather than the heavy-handed employer regs that those countries have for stability, and I think that's where we're going to have to go if job losses really start materializing.


Google search is worse because of recent AI tech flooding the internet with misinformation and low quality articles.

Low paid humans have been pumping out low quality SEO slop full of misinformation for at least the last 15-20 years, it’s not much different. If anything, the quality is probably somewhat higher.

>The average person does not really benefit from recent AI tech

ChatGPT and Gemini offer enormous consumer value for free.


What value do they get that both couldn't be done before and outweighs the costs?

Personalized learning. Some people on the US were paying over six figures to be educated and now they can do it at a much better quality for free.

You don’t pay for the insight, you pay for the certificate. If the AI doesn’t give you a degree, it doesn’t really help you. Even before AI, you could have learned stuff from a degree for free.

I don't think the software that lies to you and makes things up on a regular basis is a very good teacher. Even if it was, that's not worth the cost to society vs just improving education.

Teachers make even more up than AI in my experience. I would always trust an AI over a human teacher.

That's an incredibly depressing and anti-intellectual way to go through life.

Thinking that teachers (or AIs) are always right is the anti-intellectual way to go through life. Between a teacher or an AI just going off of its training data is a close call; between a teacher and an AI doing a web search it's no contest, it's the AI.

I don't see it as anti-intellectual as in person learning is going to run into physical constraints of bringing together experts of individual subjects to a student. With the power of AI and the internet it is possible to bring such specialized knowledge directly to students where they are at.

College was never about learning it was about signaling. I get two resumes on my desk, one went to Harvard, one learned about stuff on ChatGPT. Which has a higher likelihood of being a success?

It defends how you want to define success, but I would lean towards ChatGPT.

You would lean towards a resume that says "I learned from ChatGPT"? What does that even mean?

You don't have to literally say that. You just work in the skills you have acquired.

You probably meant for "free".

I meant $0.

You meant they use user data to train their models.

Which costs them money to do. Not the users.

Being critical about AI companies isn't what's pushing new people away from the tech world. The AI companies and the consequences of their actions are, as well as comments like this pretending the issues don't exist and that we need to just be positive about the "future".

And supposing these technologies do take us into the future: when said future is bleak and worse in most ways than what came before, people aren't going to be encouraged or enthusiastic about the tech world.


Meanwhile I've never run into anyone who actually likes AI in any form (except for my boss). Most people who dislike it aren't bringing it up at random. I'm sure it has to do with the circles you interact with and their demographics.

You've got the captcha issue as well? Seems like it's happening constantly now. I suspect Apple Private Relay has something to do with it, but I'm not sure.

Nope, not exclusively an Apple thing, since I don't use any Apple products at home, and have had an uptick in captcha requests.

If Claude starts sending queries to Google then Google makes you use captcha from that IP, likely you have been using such a bot and it sent queries without you knowing.

only time i ever have to deal with this anywhere (and i move physical sites a lot) is when using a commercial VPN provider. odd.

Can you be more specific? There has been opposition against most things.

AI is also the new thing currently being forced on basically every person and upending society. It shouldn't be surprising it's on the forefront of people's minds or that they might want to try to prevent it.


Maybe the issue is the "reassurance" is identical to propaganda and manipulation. It definitely doesn't help that the companies having to "reassure" people have aligned themselves with so many others that have been pushing propaganda to manipulate others for some time now. Nor does it help that many of the same companies that need to "reassure" people are also actively doing the opposite - see the billboards bragging about not hiring humans, or CEOs bragging about how AI will replace the majority of people and leave them destitute.

There's no reason for someone to trust any "reassurance" when there are so many signals indicating they shouldn't.


Reassurance is identical to propaganda and manipulation insofar as all attempt to convey beliefs. Reassurance, here, should be apparently different in that it conveys true information. In the history of mankind, it has never been easier to discern between true and false information.

If people want to throw up their hands and start believing whatever feels right, they are permitted to do so. Though they have a duty not to as citizens of a democracy, they have the right to actively pursue policies based on falsehoods. Let's not pretend it's a reasonable or respectable reaction to seeing billboards.

If somebody does want to give up on research and working out the truth, please actually give up and say you don't know. Stop coming to the city council meetings and plastering "millions of gallons" on even the social medias where that's surprising.


How can the average citizen who knows nothing about engineering/technology determine that their electric bill [as the result of a new datacenter in town] won't go up as truthful or falsehood?

Condescending responses like these are only reinforcing the original point. People don't want data centers because they don't want AI forced on them.

> Let's not pretend it's a reasonable or respectable reaction to seeing billboards.

Being angry after seeing and hearing your livelihood threatened by rich CEOs on a daily basis is a reasonable reaction. If you aren't willing or able to muster up a modicum of empathy to see that, that's concerning, and you won't ever really be able to grasp what's going on here and why AI is so despised. You've only served to make people (including myself) despise AI even more.


Being angry is not what is under discussion here. Abandoning the pursuit of truth is. Participating, either unthinkingly or with malice, in misinformation campaigns is not acceptable even if you're really mad. Start a 'AI will steal our jobs' campaign if you're angry about that- I don't think most AI critics believe that's true, but the ones you're talking about must. I don't even need empathy to be on board with that, I think my job has 5 years to expiration at best.

Just stop lying and defending liars while slandering the honest people who notice! I don't care how rich the ceos making you angry are, I don't care how pure the hatred in your heart is for this technology, none of that makes it okay! You don't get to demand my empathy while defacing the commons, sorry.


I think the marketing about not hiring humans is mostly what it is. There are also foreign entities actively spreading propaganda. But their claims are so wildly insane they get shot down pretty quickly. So it isn't just about messaging. It is about not being hated. If they hate you, the truth doesn't really matter.

I keep thinking back to that e-card, "once you hate someone, everything they do is offensive."

I don't think tech companies appreciate the extent to which they used to get the benefit of the doubt just because people liked them.


If it's being poisoned, the people poisoning it sure are.

You'll need to compare how many job postings there are as well to get the full picture, especially for junior roles. That's one of the most contentious effects and has an outsized impact on society.

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