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Comment by mthld | Hacker News Reader

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> I am ashamed of being part of the tech industry.

Unlike these folks, you don't have to be. Quit.

It’s planned. I’ll do something actually useful for people, work in medical/social care or maybe go back to farming (what my family has been doing since generations).

Feeding people with something else than marketing bullshit to their brain, feeding them something they can eat.

Farmers exploit workers all the time, probably even more so than the tech world. And, notably I think, the expectation has people doing backbreaking labor in the middle of a shapeless field, instead of sitting in an air conditioning room watching videos and occasionally typing things.

Well. My dude. There are definitely different kind of farming. And in my family case, it has always been a small business, growing vegetables and fruits, selling products locally and fair compensation for the worker.

Not every farmer has to be a capitalist piece of shit you know.

Well, isn't the same true for tech?

Speak for yourself. A lot of us here don't work in adtech or fintech and do something useful every day.

Like working in some FAANG? Spending tons of money into accelerating climate change, maximizing profits for stakeholders while aggressively suppressing every cooperative efforts for the workers to unionize?

Sounds great! Congrats!

you've accelerated climate change a little by posting this verbal diarrhea

Sounds like an admirable goal. I wish you luck.

Thanks a lot. I’ll probably earn less money, but waking up and getting out of bed every morning will be much more meaningful.

Would you be happier if we were exploiting Eastern Europeans instead?

This is a false dichotomy, gross exploitation does not need to present.

So who will train the AI?

There are levels of gray between no AI and exploit poor countries.

All of the AI companies are extremely well capitalised and can afford to be better.

If training AI requires exploitation, we should simply not train AI.

This couldn’t happen because of minimum wages. And yes I would be happy if white people would stop colonizing every piece of land and people they can find to fiddle with their little capitalist toys.

>And yes I would be happy if white people would stop colonizing every piece of land and people they can find to fiddle with their little capitalist toys.

May I suggest reading a history book on the Muslim conquest of the Balkans and Iberia? If not for Muslim colonialism Spain and Austria would have never had to become world powers to survive.

I suspect the answer is yes.

As bad as the wages might seem to someone making 1000x this, it still might be a decent salary for someone living in abject poverty and also offers the possibility that their services become more in demand as AI takes over our world which allows them to demand higher wages. Much earlier in my life I was the one to be negative on capitalism but after experiencing this process first hand I am a supporter of it. Although there are many situations where it hasn't delivered the intended benefits but in aggregate I would bet that it has.

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