Bernie Sanders: "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear" | Hacker News Reader

Bernie Sanders: "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear"

wsj.com

77 pointsfortran7769 comments

AI is probably in need of far more legal safeguards than we have now, but I am sort of tired of the "everyone will lose their jobs" narrative. There are so few jobs LLMs can fully automate. I think what will actually happen is that corporate CEOs will try to cut staff, it won't work, people will be rehired, and AI will largely make people's jobs easier and less labor-intensive.

The way this always works in a corporation is people's jobs will be just as hard or harder and they'll hire far less people. As always happens productivity per person will skyrocket and median wages will somehow be lower.

Real median wages have been increasing pretty consistently since the FRED started recording it: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

Apologies median wages was the wrong statistic to choose because the top x% rise has been astronomical. The productivity has gone up along with CEO wages. That money does get made even if the workers never see it. Or if they do see it they immediately give it back (and then some) when they pay their rent.

No, my job is already highly LLM assisted and I just have more work to do. Because now I can tackle things on the backlog we thought could never be prioritized.

For now yes.

But you will end up finishing the backlog and once competitors get rid of employees and become more profitable your employer will do the same.

Right now we're in a transitional space. Doesn't mean things will stay this way.

I’m equally disheartened by the people who dismiss job losses as unlikely because “AI can’t automate entire jobs”.

What do you suggest happens when you automate half of 10 people’s jobs? Do you expect they want to pay for 10 people to operate at 50%, or would someone be more likely to just keep 5 people to do the part they couldn’t automate (yet)? Do you think CEOs will want to add 5 more heads back later, or do you think they will add the minimum necessary and still seek a cheap alternative to fill remaining gaps?

I absolutely agree with you that it COULD make people’s jobs easier, but unless that directly translates into revenue for the company, a relaxing easy day of work isn’t generally the goal of profitable companies.

WSJ gift link: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/ai-is-a-threat-to-everything-the...

Doesn't work for me, unfortunately.

What do the American people hold dear?

Pathological demand avoidance.

In Canada, demands are not actually demands. That way if the demand is avoided, there never was a demand to begin with; however, if it was fulfilled, then of course there was always a demand all along.

wow why are so many comments in this thread against Bernie's stance?

HN will flag and downvote anti AI sentiment. There is lots of it here, you just aren't allowed to see it.

I feel like we must be visiting different websites.

Have you seen how overwhelmingly anti-AI the non-software-engineering world is? (despite the hypocrisy as plenty use a chatbot these days) The resistance in here is pitiful.

I'm lurking in the indie game dev scene, and any mention of using LLMs for anything is downvoted and laughed at.

Gamedevs are vehemently against genai art, but code generation seems more accepted from what I've seen

Most discussion of using code generation on gamedev forums is taboo. As in, do what you want in the privacy of your own home, but in public, try to have some self-respect as an artist.

I've seen some "devs" livestreaming themselves coding a game using LLMs, and it's not pretty. But that's my opinion of vibecoding in general — it's the tool one uses when they don't want to think too much, which is the furthest path to greatness.

Some random examples off reddit (try to compare the sentiment if it had been posted on Hacker News):

- https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1rvafee/using_clau...

- https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1erb39r/is_it_poss...

- https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1qll8jr/has_anyone...

- https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1jitfbi/im_tired_o...

In general, interest in AI-assisted coding is associated with people that have no experience whatsoever and just want to make a game out of thin air without putting in the effort.

I posted Bernie's "Conversation with Claude" a while back, and it was just about immediately taken down.

Let's face it Y combinator is mostly AI startups for the next few years, and any anti-AI sentiment is going to hurt the bottom line.

That being said, I disagree with Sanders on a number of points. He wants to stop data center construction. Can't think of a more luddite un-nuanced solution to the "problem"

The real AI danger is not the threat to white collar jobs (which will simply have to evolve), but something we will see roughly 18 months now when Joe Schmo asks Claude Giga Max Supreme 8.0 to help him reduce his taxes, and it hacks into the IRS and deletes everyone's records.

You think there won’t be any taxes in 2028-2029 because of AI?

Just an example off the top of my head

That sounds pretty sweet

Not sweet for all the public services that depend on taxes

That’s fine. You said we’ve got 18 months until Claude takes our taxes away so you’ve just gotta get all of your driving done in the next year and a half before the roads fall into permanent disrepair, because of AI

I'm the one who posted this link, and I think Bernie Sanders is a terible man. But an op-ed by a U.S. Senator in the WSJ about a tech issue seems like proper HN material. It's been un-flagged by the mods.

What are some of the terrible things he's done?

That would be off-topic.

We have threaded commenting here, so feel free to go off-topic.

The vitriol I see here only makes me like him more.

Posted when Silicon Valley was awake and on a break from the Easter Monday working hours.

I don't understand what you mean - is this sarcasm directed at me or the Bernie disagreers?

The rich SV worker is overwhelmingly pro-capitalism and techno-optimist; Bernie Sanders is anything but that.

It’s a threat to employment, stability, and democracy. AI is going to solidify the concentration of wealth and power like never before. It’s why so many young people fear being in the “permanent underclass”. I haven’t agreed with socialists historically but we need to change our economic and political system to have more socialism than before, and especially to reduce the concentration in the hands of a few individuals and companies. So he’s not wrong.

Explain why this stance, repeated often throughout history at the first sight of innovation (the plow, the car, electricity, phones, the internet, etc), and wrong every single time, is correct now.

The plow was regarded as a threat to democracy? I'm going to need to see some references for that claim...

(not OP but likely they're trying some "Luddites were wrong, too!" thing. And if so, also misunderstanding the Luddites)

Jesus, these people are so stupid, they can’t even ask an LLM to come up with a more comprehensible response.

> Explain why this stance, repeated often throughout history at the first sight of innovation (the plow, the car, electricity, phones, the internet, etc), and wrong every single time, is correct now.

The scale and the speed of the changes brought about by AI are almost certainly going to be far greater than anything we've ever seen in the past. Scale matters. The entire value of LLMs is proof that scale matters.

It wasn’t wrong every single time. In fact, many of the more successful social programs in the US happened as a response to extreme poverty and economic disruption (the Great Depression).

People need to get it into their fucking heads that things get really ugly and violent under systems of extreme income inequality.

So far, AI is not focusing on solving that problem, just making it easier for tech people to get richer.

AI is the best thing that happened to America in the last decade, and I dearly hope that politicians don't try to ruin it the way they're ruining other parts of the country.

I respect some of Bernie's positions, but his stance on tech is dangerous.

AI is the best thing that happened for a relatively few number of privileged people, most of them being located in USA. This includes the programmers that may have benefited from using AI assistants.

AI has already stolen great amounts of money from a very large number of people all around the world, due to the huge increases in the prices of DRAM, SSDs and HDDs.

Moreover, there have already been a great number of layoffs, which truly or not have been blamed on AI. AI may have not been the true reason for those, but it certainly has provided a convenient justification.

There is no doubt that the number of people who have already been harmed by AI greatly exceeds the number of people who have benefited from AI.

There is no reason to believe that this trend will not continue.

When used in the right way, there is no doubt that LLMs and other ML/AI tools can ensure a significant progress, but from the recent history it seems almost certain that they will be more often used in the wrong way than in the right way, so most people will be negatively affected, not positively.

The problem is not AI itself, but the fact that AI is a tool controlled by extremely evil people, e.g. Sam Altman and Larry Ellison. It is very unlikely that this will change and this is the reason why AI will do more harm than good.

(There are a lot of examples that prove that individuals like those that I have named are truly evil, but I will just quote from TFA: "Larry Ellison predicts an AI-powered surveillance state in which “citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on”". Even only this is enough to prove that Ellison is an enemy.)

Well it's not like AI investment money is coming out of thin air - ultimately normies are buying stuff that AI enhanced companies produce which allows those companies to feed this money to the actual winners/1% that truly benefits. I don't think that it's fair to say that AI has been only negative to the normies, when they need to be the ones willingly feeding the beast with their money for the whole thing to perpetuate.

That said I obviously also see a bunch of negative consequences, and perhaps agree that the negatives outweigh the positives.

> AI has already stolen great amounts of money from a very large number of people all around the world, due to the huge increases in the prices of DRAM, SSDs and HDDs.

None of that is stealing. That's the free market.

To America as a whole? How?

AI is certainly powerful, but despite tech CEO whitewashing, none of them are planning for how the economy will recover from a potential devastation of white collar jobs. Token bills fund rich investors & executives, not everyday Americans.

For AI to give me abundant free time & happiness, I need to have money, and I don’t see UBI anywhere on OpenAI’s roadmap.

> I don’t see UBI anywhere on OpenAI’s roadmap.

Do you really think it's OpenAI's job to create UBI? Surely, if you feel that it's a good idea, then it should be the government who sets it up.

We can't just magically freeze the economy in time. If we conduct our industries inefficiently just to keep jobs around, we won't be competitive on a global market.

I have strong concerns around the inflationary effects of UBI, but whatever the solution there is, it's not the responsibility of private companies to organize their own welfare systems.

For those of us who watched FB play the “move fast and break things” card, and are now watching the predicted effects of that play out, we think people like YOU are dangerous, and we respect people like Bernie for trying to pump the brakes (knowing the last 10 years have been downhill).

Few notes:

The author uses polls that people are negative on AI, but people use it. All the time. And it's organic. Much like people started bringing Excel into the workplace and IT departments had to catch up, people are using personal AI and IT departments are freaking out. It's obvious that people find it useful (it's the fastest growing product in history). Why go off some polls that spread doomer nonsense?

Billionaires investing money in creating products that nearly a billion people use rather than improving the lives of working families? Are the billionaires elected leaders? Why is that burden on them. The government gets trillions every year, yet try to get people to believe they are just a few billion shy of providing medicare for all and free childcare. Give me a break

AI will create a police state? We've had cameras pretty much everywhere for decades, yet somehow unsolved killings reach a record high in 2023. We don't even bother locking up the people that get arrested. The number of prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%

No one's buying it from these politicians anymore. You're in politics, you have trillions to spend. Just get your shit together, actually help people and stop with these hysterics.

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...

https://substack.com/home/post/p-149002604

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