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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Given the degree to which knowledge workers dominate politics, the rush to erect legal barriers to AI adoption is going to be rapid. It’s already happening: https://idfpr.illinois.gov/news/2025/gov-pritzker-signs-stat...

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Blanket characterization of regulation, as malicious barriers to AI adoption, creates the perfect smoke screen to deflect discussion of the actual problems we are seeing.

The law you linked to prohibits firms from using AI to provide therapy, this doesn’t stop people from doing it anyway. It’s a far cry from saying that knowledge workers are rushing to erect legal barriers to AI adoption.

A large number of knowledge workers are busy trying to increase adoption of AI, a behavior at odds with your claim.

That this argument is made, in a forum populated by knowledge workers, is ironic.

What problem does preventing companies from providing AI back mental health services does this legislation provide except?

> protecting the jobs of Illinois’ thousands of qualified behavioral health providers

Are you unaware that genAI tools reaffirm beliefs of people in manic or delusional states?

Most professional services already have a moat around them in that you need to be licensed in order to practice the profession; AI can’t disrupt these industries because A) after three years, the hallucination issue has not improved and B) the AI itself can’t legally perform most of the services a licensed professional is permitted to provide.

It’s easy to write off this sort of regulation as economic protectionism if you’re a true believer in the technology, but from personal experience, the LLMs I have used are only really good for solving well-understood programming problems and doing what Google used to do 10 years ago. You can maybe use them to power some blackhat marketing efforts but most of what I’ve seen there are just run-of-the-mill spam operations that have discovered Reddit.

Too little too late. I mean we all deserve it tbh, apathetic tribal species.

AI therapy is hardly a good example of trying to erect barriers to AI adoption. I don’t think they’re trying to protect practitioners they’re trying to protect patients.

I will be absolutely shocked if there is any real attempt to regulate AI adoption. Capitalists gotta capital.

Who do you think is spending money lobbying politicians to ban this? Do you think it's a depressed patients activist group who is scared someone might try to sell them a cheap always available AI therapist?

Or do you think it's a therapist group who just so happens to be pushing for barriers that protect their jobs while gaslighting themselves into thinking it's to protect their patients.

The first. No one gives a fuck about workers. I hope I’m wrong by the way, nothing would make me happier than LLm’s being regulated out of existence.

Workers do not dominate politics in any way, shape or form. Owners do.

Society has multiple classes with distinct interests. It’s not just “owners versus workers.” In the U.S., the top 0.1% own about 14% of the wealth, but most of the rest is owned by the top 25% outside the top 0.1%. Within this class there is a spectrum of “ownership.” Tim Cook is technically a worker, but he has “owner” wealth. But he came into that wealth by being a worker—he never risked his own capital to start a business, nor did he inherit assets. This is especially true for knowledge work, where putative workers typically are non-fungible in ways that give them a great deal of leverage with owners.

Society does have multiple classes, yes but one in particular dominates politics - the ownership class.

See here for the relevant study: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746

That study defines “elite” as the top 10% of income earners, which is mostly skilled and knowledge workers, not owners. I can’t access the PDF but there was a reddit thread about the methodology: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/73nbuv/in.... So that is consistent with my point that knowledge workers have lots of political power.

Also, Vox did a piece discussing subsequent research that suggests that whatever effect Gilens and Page are seeing is relatively weak: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-.... I suspect you’d find a stronger correlation if you compared knowledge workers versus blue collar workers (I.e. accounted for the fact that you have fairly affluent tradespeople and medium income knowledge workers, like entry level folks who work in marketing).

>That study defines “elite” as the top 10% of income earners

The study does not define elite that way, it simply notes that the likelihood of a policy being implemented trends upward with income.

>that is consistent with my point that knowledge workers have lots of political power.

I cant see anything on this reddit thread which indicates this.

>Also, Vox did a piece discussing subsequent research that suggests

Im sure they did. It's not unusual for corporate backed think tanks to push back on studies which run counter to their narrative. The same thing happened with r>g, minimum wage increases across state borders, etc.

The quote from the paper on the reddit thread discusses dividing people into income quintiles. I assume you actually read the paper and understand the methodology?

It showed a direct correlation between income and your impact on policy.

It would, alas, be scientifically illiterate to assume that since they divided the public into 10 quintiles that the correlation suddenly stopped above the 90.1% threshold.

And, it would be regular old illitetate to assume that crossing from 89.9% to 90% puts you firmly in the cateogory of "elite" because of how a study divided up income quintiles.

There is a difference between a true elite (e.g. gets put in charge of a government department of your own creation) and somebody who just earns a lot of money and generally benefits from tax breaks lobbied for by those elites.

Almost half the world is children, elderly, or disabled. The first two have reduced capacity to run a business and the latter have reduced earning capacity to obtain the business.

Once you consider maybe half of all humans even have the chance to become owners, even if it means building something out of nothing, you don't have such a bad chance of being in the 50% of the 50%. Bad luck happens, but if you can avoid divorce/illness/drugs/laziness there is a very good chance you could own something to make you an owner-capitalist even if it is just a hot dog stand in Timbuktu.

> knowledge workers^H^H^H^H^H^Howners dominate politics

fixed it for you

What level of institutional and cultural acceptance, de jure or de facto, would be needed to make you feel otherwise here?

Like on its face, looking around the world, this sentiment feels absurd right now. We are moving mountains to build this stuff up. AI is not the lowly underdog here, it is immediately the top of the food chain.

If things are not moving fast enough for you, that feels more like personal contradiction you are working through here. Like it almost sounds like you want this to be the 90s again and be a Cypherpunk advocating for cause, but you look around and actually you're already the suits, the feds; you're on top, and the virtuous fight for freedom was null and void from the start. So all you can do is force yourself into feeling like a victim always already. September was too short!

Yes, just like we rushed to forming unions! /s

Unfortunately I don’t think meritocracy and protectionism make for good roommates inside white collar brains.

It just means countries like China will offer these services and gain an advantage over the US.

Except not really, as evidenced by China hamstringing private rollout of AI tools like facial recognition or data-based surveillance and retaining those solely for the government’s use. They know that whatever issues the US is grappling with now, they’re not too far behind, and they have the added benefit of learning from our mistakes.

Governments have as much to fear from mass labor displacement as they do to gain from AI-turbocharged surveillance and warfare. It’s why competent regimes will tighten rules to stem or stop unnecessary bleeding and preserve their power.

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