Hacker News Reader

Comment by groos | Hacker News Reader

It's not just that AI is being pushed on to employees by the tech giants - this is true - but that the hype of AI as a life changing tech is not holding up and people within the industry can easily see this. The only life-changing thing it's doing is due to a self-fulfilling prophecy of eliminating jobs in the tech industry and outside by CEOs who have bet too much on AI. Everyone currently agrees that there is no return on all the money spent on AI. Some players may survive and do well in the future but for a majority there is only the prospect of pain, and this is what all the negativity is about.

View on HN

As a layoff justification and a hurryup tool, it is pretty loathesome. People use their jobs for their housing, food, etc.

More than this man. AI is making me re-appreciate part of the Marxist criticism of capitalism. The concept of worker alienation could be easily extended in new forms to the labor situation in an AI-based economy. FWIW, humans derive a lot of their self-evaluation as people from labor.

Marx was correct in his identification of the problem (the communist manifesto still holds up today). Marx went off the rails with his solution.

Getting everyone to even agree that this is a problem is impossible. I'm open to the universe of solutions, as long as it isn't "Anthropic and OpenAI get another $100 billion dollars while we starve". We can probably start there.

It's a problem, it's just not the root problem.

The root problem is nepo babies.

Whether it's capitalism or communism or whatever China has currently - it's all people doing everything to give their own children every unfair advantage and lie about it.

Why did people flee to America from Europe? Because Europe was nepo baby land.

Now America is nepo baby land and very soon China will be nepo baby land.

It's all rather simple. Western 'culture' is convincing everyone the nepo babies running things are actually uber experts because they attended university. Lol.

Yeah, unfortunately Marx was right about people not realizing the problem, too. The proletariat drowns in false consciousness :(

In reality, the US is finally waking up to the fact that the "golden age" of capitalism in the US was built upon the lite socialism of the New Deal, and that all the bs economic opinions the average american has subscribed to over the past few decades was completely just propaganda and anyone with half a brain cell could see from miles away that since reagonomics we've had nothing but a system that leads to gross accumulation to the top and to the top alone and this is a sure fire way (variable maximization) in any complex system to produce instability and eventual collapse.

There's a false dichotomy in that conclusion.

> humans derive a lot of their self-evaluation as people from labor.

We're conditioned to do so, in large part because this kind of work ethic makes exploitation easier. Doesn't mean that's our natural state, or a desirable one for that matter.

"AI-based economy" is too broad a brush to be painting with. From the Marxist perspective, the question you should be asking is: who owns the robots? and who owns the wealth that they generate?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com