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Comment by delbronski | Hacker News Reader

AI is starting to look like a net negative for humanity. I remember the early days of OpenAI. I was super excited about it. There was a new space to uncover and learn about. I was hopeful.

Now I have this love/hate relationship with it. Claude Code is amazing. I use it everyday because it makes me so much more efficient at my job. But I also know that by using it I’m contributing to making my job redundant one day.

At the same time I see how much resources we are wasting on AI. And to what end? Does anybody really buy the BS that this will all make the world a better place one day? So many people we could shelter and feed, but instead we are spending it on trying to make your computer check and answer your emails for you. At what point do we just look up and ask… what is the damn purpose of all of this? I guess money.

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Well, on the other hand, software isn’t all about checking emails.

I know someone who worked for a nonprofit that made pregnancy health software that worked over text messaging. Its clients were women in Africa who didn’t have much, but they had a cell phone, so they could get reminders, track vitals, and so forth.

They had to find enough funding to pay several software engineers to build and maintain that system. If AI allows a single person to do it, at much lower cost, is that bad?

This is awesome. It's sad that examples like this are few and far between.

Are they? Or do you just mean that it's few and far between that we hear about them? If it's the former, I think there's a much bigger universe of this kind of stuff than most people realize. Otoh, if you're just commenting on the lack of coverage, then, yeah I agree I wish more publicity was paid to small software like this. Maybe we need a catchy term - "organic software"? "Locally grown software"?

I talked to my friends who aren't in tech a lot about what they would want with software. A lot of the benefits of small software like this would actually be compliance and reporting issues with non-profit. Sifting through large amounts of data with very unstructured inputs.

The actual community building is fairly not as automated unless you have very specific problems. Like even in the example above, having an automated message is useful but staffing the team to handle when things are NOT in a good spot would probably be the real scaling cost.

So, here is a case where AI was a technical fix to a social problem: that as a global society, funding is skewed away from things which benefit people. Google can find the budget for as many ad-touchers as it wants, but nonprofits have to scrounge and make do by paying for "metered intelligence" from a megacorp.

So in isolation, I think it's great that they managed to achieve this. But I mourn that the only way they achieved it was via this rapacious truth-destroying machine.

This isn't a new trend - AI didn't cause it. It's just the latest version of it.

To be clear, this work was done years pre-AI. I was just giving an example of how lowering software development costs could be a public good.

I feel you. This whole hoo-haa has made me so much more money-minded, and so much less optimistic about Software Development than I was 10 years ago. I just remind myself that it's bad now, but it can get much worse. Now I'm just trying to get what I can, then hopefully retire volunteering at an animal conservation sanctuary. And to the AI hopefuls, good luck, because I don't see any future where the zeitgeist of this technology won't just be about lining the pockets of already rich people.

The problem is scale. Beyond a certain scale it’s all a net negative: social networks, bitcoin, ads, machine learning, automated trading, big this big that, etc.

Unfortunately for fellow developers, software enables massive scale.

starting? it was pretty clearly a net negative from the get go

> But I also know that by using it I’m contributing to making my job redundant one day.

I don't see how this is the case if you're anything more than a junior engineer... it unlocks so many possibilities. You can do so much more now. We are more limited by our ideas at this point than anything else.

Why is the reaction of so many people, once their menial work gets automated, "oh no, my menial work is automated." Why is it not "sweet, now I can do bigger/better/more ambitious things?"

(You can go on about corporate culture as the cause, but I've worked at regular corporations and most of FAANG. Initiative is rewarded almost everywhere.)

> Does anybody really buy the BS that this will all make the world a better place one day?

Why is it BS? I'm shocked that anyone with a love and passion for technology can feel this way. Have you not seen the long history of automation and what it has brought humanity?

There is a reason that we aren't dying of dysentery at the ripe age of 45 on some peasant field after a hard winter day's worth of hard labor. The march of automation and technology has already "made the world a better place."

Keep marching that automation and tehcnology to an acidified ocean. But hey, at least now we can code faster than we can review!

AI won't be what acidifies our ocean, but AGI might save us from it.

Strangely enough, I don't see you calling to end the consumption of meat which would have a far larger environmental impact while not slowing global progress at all.

> AI won't be what acidifies our ocean

Tech is what got us where we are. AI allows us to use more energy to produce more of what is currently measurably killing us.

> but AGI might save us from it.

This is just faith. Some believe that prayers may save us.

"AI energy usage" is a convenient scapegoat not backed by data.

Many things are orders of magnitude bigger than AI in the energy usage problem that bring less comparable value.

I'm starting to get to the point where I'll only listen to AI energy use critiques if the commentator tells me up front they abstain from all forms of social media, especially video-based social media, first.

Lucky me: I don't use social media at all.

Note that I did not criticise the AI energy. I criticised tech as a whole. Tech is part of the problem (the problem here being "we are killing our only planet").

If the current admin wasn't waging a war on the renewables they don't have personal investments in and propping up their own AI investments energy needs with revitalized fossil fuel barons while they get in on the new pie-in-the-sky "future" energy sources the tech oligarchs point to (nuclear fusion startups) in order to at least get rich if an alternative fuel source they actually invested in pans out, I could perhaps reconsider the notion that this comment isn't worth the pixel it's colored on.

> "AI energy usage" is a convenient scapegoat not backed by data.

Except it's not what I said.

What I said is that with AI, we do more with more (energy). "Doing more" has repercussions that go further than just the energy used to vibe code.

The reason we are measurably living in a mass extinction (that is happening orders of magnitudes faster than the one that made the dinosaurs disappear) is also the reason the climate is measurably warming (to the point where it will probably kill many of us): we are really good at producing more by using more energy.

It's not one thing (like airplanes, or meat, or whatever you want): it's everywhere. It's the whole race for producing more and more. AI is exactly part of that.

Looking at the direct energy consumption of a technology (here AI) while conveniently ignoring all its indirect impacts and concluding that "I can't understand why people think that tech is part of the problem" shows a big lack of understanding of... well, what will probably kill your kids, most likely theirs.

And I’m shocked that anyone into tech can be so blind to the adverse effects the current tech industry is having on our world and our society.

We owe it to the world, as the experts, to be critical. The march of automation and technology has made the world a better place in some ways. I sure love modern medicine, but those drones flying over Ukraine and Russia sure don’t seem like they are making the world a better place. Nuclear bombs are not making the work a better place. Misinformation in social media is not making the world a better place.

Any belief you drink blindly will eventually find a way to harm you.

> There is a reason that we aren't dying of dysentery at the ripe age of 45 on some peasant field after a hard winter day's worth of hard labor.

Tell that to the people who will die before 45 because of global instability and global warming, I guess?

>Why is the reaction of so many people, once their menial work gets automated, "oh no, my menial work is automated." Why is it not "sweet, now I can do bigger/better/more ambitious things?"

because i have rent to pay? old age to prepare for?

why is it so hard to understand most people are not rich, that the cost of living is high, and that most people are VERY afraid their jobs will be automated away? why is so hard to understand that most people haven't worked at FAANG, they don't have stocks or savings, and are squeezed harder with every new day and every new war?

what world, what reality are you guys living in?!

Because there is always work to do. It is true that demand will drop for those that don't take initiative and aren't sure what to do now that AI can do their repetitive tasks. However, demand will surge for those that can think critically about how to utilize AI to empower businesses.

"Software engineer" as a profession is rapidly getting automated at my company, and yet our SWEs are delivering more value than ever before. The layer of abstraction has changed, that is all.

> what world, what reality are you guys living in?!

One that has seen immense benefits from the Industrial Revolution and previous waves of automation.

you might want to brush up on the short and medium consequences of the industrial revolution and the dark satanic mills where children were maimed or where people worked for 12h a day in horrendous conditions.

Do you think because 2 dev are now super productive with AI, the company will keep the other average 30 devs? no, of course not, they will fire and pocket the difference. Same for other industries, where AI will slowly diffuse like a poisonous gas and displace jobs and people, leaving behind a crippled white collar class. The profits will not trickle down and the increased productivity will be a hatchet, not a plough.

where children were maimed or where people worked for 12h a day in horrendous conditions

Such things were super uncommon before the industrial revolution, I'm sure.

Working conditions did decline as a result of industrialization. It wasn't until around the 20th century that we could say working conditions were better for most people than pre-industrial society.

More workers died working the fields prior to the Industrial Revolution, than in factories.

Source?

> Do you think because 2 dev are now super productive with AI, the company will keep the other average 30 devs? no, of course not, they will fire and pocket the difference

Yes, they will keep the other devs that can figure out how to use AI well. Businesses want to grow.

That hasn't been my experience or the experience of anyone I know or have talked to about how LLMs have affected their work. The parent comment explains what happened.

The businesses fired the staff and pocketed the difference. The result? Growth, at least on paper, as you're saying. Previously they were paying for 10 people and now they're paying for 2 so more profit yay! Of course this is a short term gain which might result in long term pain. That last part remains to be seen.

Businesses are competing for the same pie. They can’t all be growing. There aren’t enough clients. There isn’t enough money.

> I don't see how this is the case if you're anything more than a junior engineer... it unlocks so many possibilities.

I really don't understand this way of thinking. Don't you think that AI could replace senior engineers? Sure, companies will be able to do bigger / better / more ambitious stuff - but without any software engineers.

> Why is it BS? I'm shocked that anyone with a love and passion for technology can feel this way. Have you not seen the long history of automation and what it has brought humanity?

I definitely think that AI will be a net benefit for society but it could easily end up being be bad for me.

there doesnt seem to be a limit in terms of the ceiling of what companies can do with software, probably the most elastic demand out of any industry ever

the swe role is going to change but problem solving systems thinkers with initiative won't go away

That's a possible outcome. Another possibility is that AI will handle all of the thinking and problem solving part. So the market value of thinking will drop. The bottleneck will still be humans, but their input will be (1) doing physical, real-world stuff (2) providing data that the AI doesn't have, e.g. information about a specific problem domain or how does a user interface feel.

assuming no asi, the market value of thinking without accountability trends to zero, the bottleneck will be thinking + accountability, at least for knowledge work

if ai truly solves novel thinking then nothing is a barrier. the physical world is downstream from robotics which is downstream from software. itll be able to persuade nation states to collect data for itself etc etc (insert sci fi ending)

So far AI doesn't seem even close to replacing senior engieeners. Hell, it can't even replace junior engieeners entirely.

I use AI agents every day at work and I'm happy with that, but it took over two years and billions of dollars in investment to deliver anything useful (Claude Code et al). The current models are amazing, but they still randomly make mistakes that even a junior wouldn't make.

There's another paradigm shift to be made certainly, because currently it feels like we scaled up a bug brain to spit out code. It works great for some problems, but it's not what software developers usually do at work.

I am having similar thoughts.

To add to list of questions - it's undeniable the AI is making humans dumber by doing mental job previously done by humans. So why we spend so much energy making AI smarter and fellow humans dumber?

Shouldn't we be moving in opposite direction - invest in people instead of some software and greedy psychopaths at helm of large companies behind it?

>Does anybody really buy the BS that this will all make the world a better place one day?

Yeah - I think there's a lot of cool sci-fi like stuff in the future.

And probably a lot of uncool sci-fi like stuff, e.g. The Machine Stops.

Sci-fi often seems a bit downbeat. I guess everything goes quite well doesn't make for a good story.

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