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Comment by jeauxlb | Hacker News Reader

Why are you happy that people are out of a job here? You still suffer the ills of the product, now infinitely more incessant, at a marginal cost of $0.

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I think it's reasonable to be happy that someone is not getting paid to do something you hate. In fact, if you're suffering unwillingly, you probably want as few people as possible to benefit.

OpenAI is getting paid to do it.

Yes, but a lot less than if a person were getting paid to do it, so still less money is changing hands.

I don't know which of "5 randos getting a living wage by spamming me" and "Altman getting filty rich by spamming me" is worse. I'm inclined to say the latter, though of course it's quite close.

Wish SV would stop thinking anything that makes money is great, no matter the crap it inflicts on people. Guess I'm asking for way too much.

I don’t think so. Marketers don’t send X amount of spam because X is the right amount of spam they want to send. They are limited by how much money they want to pay in salaries and management, which defines how many people they can hire to send spam.

If the people they employ today suddenly became twice as productive, the company wouldn’t fire half of them - they just would enjoy twice the profit. The same applies to AI.

Because maybe, just maybe — those people will find some other jobs, and those jobs will be more socially beneficial this time? One can dream.

They can maybe get jobs for Microsoft and call people up to tell them they've noticed something is wrong with their computer!!

“maybe, just maybe”

“One can dream.”

You’ve either used these sarcastically, or accurately. I think you’ve done the former, but the truth is the latter.

I am absolutely serious. Any employment has opportunity costs: a person who writes and sends out cold call spam e-mail for 8 hours a day is a person who could be spending those 8 hours on something else, but isn't. Yes, switching jobs is not very easy, and it's stressful but humans, thankfully, are not (yet) a species of highly-specialized individuals, with distinct morphological differences that heavily determine the jobs they potentially can or can not do.

So I was right, you did use it sarcastically, since you are still naive

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