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Comment by rwak12 | Hacker News Reader

How will the people here who continuously rationalize AI rationalize this? A substantial number of the cheerleaders are financially invested in AI of course, but there are useful idiots, too.

You are destroying a profession that was fun and profitable. Don't come with your Luddite and "a subset of us did it to others as well" talking points.

Adding numbers wasn't fun, spreadsheets by hand weren't fun. But you are actively destroying fun thinking, perhaps because you have never worked on anything substantial yourselves and want to drag others down.

Stop enrolling in CS, let us see how that works out for FAANG in 5 years. There is no incentive any longer.

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There are a lot of valid reasons to hate AI, but I don't think "morale of Meta engineers" is a very good one. What were they building? Maybe it was fun--some fun tech seems to have come out of Meta--but what was its social impact? On teenage mental health? On politics and the electorate in the US? On the Rohingya? And they meanwhile they were compensated very well for years.

I don't know that this has a ton to do with AI. Meta has had "fuck around" money for a very long time, the kind of money that let Zuckerberg hire a ton of people to make the Metaverse. And it let a lot of engineers work on things they were passionate about but that don't directly drive profits.

As Meta's stock price falls that fuck around money falls away and people's jobs are suddenly a lot more focused on making the company cash. Of course that's going to make people miserable.

It's a story, but I don't really agree with this explanation. Fucking around burning money on VR didn't help morale in the other 90% of the company. And in general employees (all with RSUs) were happy about the stock price appreciation that came from a renewed fiscal discipline post 2022 or so.

How will the people who continuously rationalize cars justify that they are destroying a profession - horse carriage driver - that was fun and profitable ?

How will the people who continuously rationalize the Internet justify that they are destroying a profession - travel agents - that was fun and profitable?

If we blocked every possible innovation because it lowered the fun of something existing we'd never have progressed past the Stone Age.

Professionally driving a horse carriage wasn't fun. Noise, boredom, unloading things manually if it was a carriage for goods. It was probably a moderately horrible job.

Travel agents used to give better recommendations and even cheaper flights. There is little innovation in the ad laden travel sites that give bad deals. Case in point: Often if you call a hotel directly you get a better price than on the sites and they don't give you the room next to the elevator that appears to be reserved for people who order via the sites.

Real anti-stone-age innovation has mostly been in the physical world to free up time for thinking. That is what the rich people who cannot think for themselves now want to take away.

cars are not exactly a success story. Both of your examples (cars and internet) are things that had some great applications but also have been mis-used or over-used.

cars: people now live completely car-dependent lives and drive way too much. our infrastructure cannot handle people driving so much and it's extremely expensive and bad for our health and terrible for the environment

internet: well... obviously... social media and all the harms that come with that.

Even if you believe that humanity would have been better if a some global dictator could have stopped the Internet and the Internal combustion system, that's simply not how society works.

If you want another analogy, it's like Feudal Knights complaining about the introduction of the crossbow. Not only were their efforts doomed to fail even the question became irrelevant with the unstoppable march of technological innovation.

But I'm not arguing for stopping the internet or stopping cars from existing. I think both of those things have great applications that shouldn't be ignored.

All I'm saying is that many technologies are a double-edged sword. They can have wonderful uses that make life better, but they can also make life worse in some ways. The Internet and cars are two perfect examples of that. And by the time we realize the harms of these technologies, it's too late.

So perhaps the challenge with any technology is figuring out how to reap the benefits without letting things get out of hand.

Help, the whigs are loose on HackerNews again! Quick, grab even a rudimentary understanding of human history. It's their one weakness.

AI probably can be useful but not used like this

Of course Zuckerberg has no idea what he's doing

They'll use the same tired and morally bankrupt excuse as everyone else that builds horrible things: "If we don't do it, someone else will. (Also we'll make so much money doing it!)"

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