To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
musings.martyn.berlin
musings.martyn.berlin
I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a part of themselves that is beyond nature and has a "special" place in the universe.
According to Google Wikipedia still gets 4 billion pageviews a month. The article seems a bit hyperbolic. There are certainly concerns around the nature of work and the economy, though. There are of course ongoing concerns about global warming. I'm not denying that, but I don't think it's particular to AI tech.
I dont understand why the old definition of AI keeps being retconned.
AI is pithy, and can be anything from skynet to… skynet. Or clippy, technically, but everyone seems to have forgotten about him.
FOMO drives the valuation, and the more vagueness and ambiguity you can have, the easier it is to stoke it. And if the option is being part owner of a world conquering, game changing tech - or a victim - which would you choose?
The name basically means anything a computer can do, and has meant almost anything a computer does at some point. So it's not a very useful word anyway, no loss in letting marketers use it to whatever Tormentus Nexus they are working towards.
I'm not sure why we allowed it, but they have been working on it for more than 50 years. My best guess is that they just kept insisting on it until people lost attention for an instant, and then did it again, and again.
UK an Germany practically invented the concept, and the US practically wrote the manual on how to make a welfare state.
Intelligence is usually defined as the skill in pursuing a goal, or speed of acquiring the ability for pursuing given goal. Given the goal-dependent nature, it's not that useful to use the same tests and measurements for intelligence over time, be it artificial or not.
[1] Legg, S., Hutter, M.: A collection of definitions of intelligence
[2] François Chollet, On the Measure of Intelligence
Imagine if we had social media during the flip from geocentrism.
There was never any old definition AI that limited it to such a tiny set of capabilities.
AI is controversial because the term intelligent is controversial and covers so much.
The term "AI" never meant bots in general.
It's true that in games bots were also called AI but only in a specific context and niche, and it is not what the whole conversation is about.
What period of history would you want your children to be born into, with zero control over where or who they’d be born to? Just a random person on the earth on a date you choose, what would be your choice?
I'm sorry but anyone who looks at Star Trek as a serious model for anything is at best naive. It's a space fantasy show whose Luxury Space Communism is little more than set dressing because it's a capitalist enterprise (pun intended come at me petaQs) made by capitalists for capitalist ends.
Likewise, expecting LLMs to serve anti-capitalist ends (eliminating the need for jobs among anyone but the capitalist class) when they are entirely controlled by capitalists is naive.
* according to the canon set by Gene Roddenberry. What actually plays out in the franchise is different, because human conflict makes for better entertainment.
Practically no one starves. The murder rate is down by crazy numbers. I'm not sure how much of a problem racism was at that time, but you wouldn't have had many chances to meet people from different haplogroups in any case.
The abundance created by industrial society is not distributed "evenly" or "fairly" but the baseline shift is insane.
We don’t get Star Trek post-scarcity by forcing everyone to do less, only by doing more. Creating more technology and creating (and consuming) more energy. Much more, near infinite amounts of it, that is what the replicator needs to create mass from energy.
It's just the mimicry thereof. I probably fall into the "pro-AI" camp if we want to divide things along the binary, but it's pretty facile to consider this software to possess or represent "intelligence" IMO.
I agree with that, but I don't think anyone is moving the goalposts as you imply later in your post.
Machine learning wasn't unheard of 20 years ago, and statistical text engines were hitting consumer use (iPhone autocomplete probably what 2008-2010?)
It’s not general intelligence, but it’s a system that’s able to produce novel outputs from its inputs in pursuit of a goal. The fact that the goal is always externally-provided is more related to consciousness than intelligence.
Search algorithms used to be considered a part of AI research. The whole point of the field, from the Turing test onward, has been that mimicry is in some sense all you need. Maybe there's a coherent philosophical position where intelligence is defined as some intrinsic property possessed by conscious agents, but I find it remarkably hard to come up with a precise definition along those lines.
Not just computers, but documents! It's amazing to be able to paste in a few RFCs and then interrogate the documents to get a better understanding of them.
It is truly an amazing time we live in. I get the worries and fear too, but it is still amazing.
The AI you read of as a child (speaking for myself, coming from a lot of 80s sci-fi stories) is not all good of course; that's where most of the plot's conflict comes from. But LLMs, for a lot of people, are more burdened with the downsides sci-fi stories warned us about with very little, if any, of the advantages.
And speaking of forests for the trees, you zoom out a bit more and see that this AI hype train is following a years-long trend of SV being exposed for its moral failings. We have repeatedly shown, as an industry, that we missed the point of the literature we so love to quote. From the concept of "meritocracy" to naming a company "Palantir". The AI hype is not an isolated incident. We love to quote Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park but it's all rhetoric---we don't really ask ourselves that question!
Even if not, interesting AIs were at least interesting characters in a story sense (e.g. C3P0).
Now we're dealing with effectively the opposite - something that looks and behaves like a person but is decidedly not one. If you grew up with all the scifi about sympathetic (or at least charismatic) AI characters, this is probably sobering.
Depends on which sci-fi and/or literature you've been reading, I suppose?
Plenty written on these subjects where the future does not turn into some techno-utopia. And I've always found these takes on the subject much more compatible with the human condition as I've personally observed it in practice.
conversational interfaces we've had for decades. In fact this goes so far back that people thought ELIZA was sentient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect), and not just laypersons but even the people working on it.
The actual lesson from this stuff is that linguistic interfaces fry people's brains, you could convince nerds that a brick was intelligent if you hooked it up to the voice of Scarlett Johansson. The perception that these systems are in any meaningful way intelligent, when they start getting stuck in a doom loop of fixing the same two bugs by reintroducing them in circles or give entire reviews for a music album that doesn't actually exist, is entirely in the head of the user.
It's annoying in my context but it's no wonder people jumping into open ended "conversations" with these things and up in dangerous feedback loops
Delusion.
Replace "AI" in that sentence with any rapidly evolving tech: social networks, smart homes, digital governments, hell - even online shopping.
The versions of any of those things a child would've read 20 years ago won't have anywhere near the complexities and unexpected downsides all those things ended up having in real life.
20 years ago, AI to (kid) me was a real life C3PO, or an npc in an open-world game that existed in that world with their own motivation and story independent of what you did. Or the stereotypical humanoid robot with consciousness like in the film "A.I.". No kid could've imagined vibe coding, running sub-agents, diffusion models, AI zombies, and all this other stuff we have today. Everything you imagined as a child is still possible, and depending on what exactly you read, is already here.
Yeah the UX is different than what anyone 20 years ago would've predicted, but how does this mean the "hate" make sense? That's not even 0.1% of the reason the typical anti-AI people are against AI.
I have been too, but LLMs aint it, just like mobile phones is not subspace communicator...
I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now.
Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob. Trying to stand up for your right to a safe public space brands you as evil.
There's no room for a middle ground or nuance anymore. You are either entirely in one tribe, or entirely out.
Are you having these conversations about politics in person? Or are these conversations happening on Twitter/Reddit/HN/whatever?
In my experience, online forums don't really work for political discussion for a bunch of reasons.
If you change to getting your fix of politics from long-form articles and radio-style scripted podcasts by professional journalists, you'll probably find there's a lot more room for nuance.
I can't speak for the other poster but I've had the experience they described in-person, when I was living in Victoria
I rented an apartment downtown Victoria and had pretty frequent run-ins with addicts on the streets. My friends who lived and worked further out away from the downtown core had very strong opinions about it any time I had anything negative to say about the experiences
As a counter point, I have more nuanced conversations in person and am able to do it online; however I have also moderated a community for several years and learned how to do it.
From what I can remember of research, is that there is a difference in how people express themselves online vs offline.
This is such a wild thing to bring up unprompted.
In the real world I still encounter more moderation than not except from people who spend a lot of time on TikTok.
I grew up in a small village, 300 people. There you learn to accept your neighbor political rant, otherwise you're socialy dead and that's a pretty bad place to be. I learned to dissociate the person from its opinions.
I'm living now in the city, where you don't need to listen to your neighbor because you can find a more fitting social circle. People are not able to listen and compromise, they'll just turn around and ignore you once they understand you are not on their side.
I was explaining this to a woman who was going to move in a village, and she said "how can you be friend with a person from the other end politicaly?".
It's a strange situation where the far right rural nut job are more open minded than city dwellers.
I mean it's a bit difficult to be open minded to someone that would gladly have you killed.
how can you be open minded and avoid being stuck in a bubble if you can't be friends with someone like that?
A question I find myself selfishly asking a lot is: why do I have to be the one who is accepting or tolerant of others when they may not be accepting of me or my friends and family? I should speak respectfully of rural areas and their inhabitants but cities are free game to be portrayed as dens of crime, drugs, filth, and illegal immigrants? I should respect evangelical Christian communities but my transgender friends can't enjoy the same rights, benefits, and protections of society as cisgender/heterosexual people anywhere they go in the US? To make it explicitly political, Democrats are being asked to moderate and not be so intolerant but no such demands seem to be being made of Republicans or their voters.
What you’re describing is religion applied to every opinion.
This is actually a big part of why being pro-AI is met with negativity today.
As someone who's using and building with AI and also experiences the "anti" movement, you've chosen a pretty condescending minority of the reasons why they dislike AI and painted it as the default.
"They never liked AI because they don't like the idea maybe they're not such special snowflakes in the universe"... really?
They didn't "always hate AI". Most people didn't even think of AI outside of niche things like self-driving. Instead their hatred is from LLMs and generative AI which (as far as they're concerned) didn't exist until November 30, 2022.
Actual reasons they readily share for not liking it are things like:
- it was built by abusing copyright (true with nuance)
- it's used to generate massive amounts of low value content that's overwhelming their spaces (very true)
- it's having an environmental impact (true with more nuance)
- it's making the things they want to buy more expensive (true, even things unrelated to AI)
- the loudest voices in the room have spent years telling them this could destroy humanity and/or take all their jobs (completely true)
- it's behind major layoffs (true with nuance around stated reasons vs actual)
- people who are pro-AI have a strong tendency to minimize their reasons for hating it (... obviously true)
I mean even if you like AI, it's clear we're at a place with so many reasons for people to be anti-AI that it's honestly an own goal at this point.
People didn't have opinions about generative AI as it exists today 20 years ago. The idea of a computer being able to turn any topic into a haiku would have been contentious for if it was possible, not if it was good: that sounds great!
But now we got it and it came with way more baggage than any of them ever imagined. They didn't think it'd learn to write haikus by ripping through every written word. And they didn't think it'd be used to write lots of spam instead of haikus once it could. And they didn't think the same capability would generalize to typing in an artist's name and spitting out infinitely remixed copies of their work.
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I think moving forward in a less negative direction starts with being real about why people hate AI, and it's a lot less "it makes me feel less special" than it is "it's actively reducing my quality of life" for people outside of the bubble.
I should say I do think that deeper ontological thing is why people tend to think the tech will always be a novelty or will stagnate soon, etc.
I wish the Dems could have this conversation about their policies and messaging!
Luddites, the whole of them.
[1] https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik...
The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living (and many of us still do so) -- we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training.
This is precisely the karma that is coming to us as a group. Because of this sort of stuff.
No, a 50 year old trade worker cannot "trade up" in any realistic sense. That's idiotic on it's face. And that also ignores that many folks don't want to trade up because they get satisfaction in what they do - just like some tech workers do. Man of those folks also had moral and ethical reasons to not want to join an industry assisting in putting their friends and family out of work.
> The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living
AKA automating other jobs away in many (perhaps most?) cases. Either directly or indirectly. These line-of-business applications tend to be automation of some sort which reduces manual labor. Be it on the factory floor, enabling that factory to be outsourced to China, or just making "paperwork" more efficient putting an office full of secretaries out of a job. Or working in some ad-tech enabled field which put entire industries out of work altogether.
> we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training.
Factory workers, skilled machinists, tool and die manufacturers, secretaries, accountants, journalists - effectively an infinite list - did not contribute to the IT over the past 30 years that replaced them either. That's the point being made in this sub-thread.
But hey, you could always pivot your career to be a plumber, roofer, or electrician! While I'm certainly going to be part of the targeted group, I can't really say I'll be surprised at the working class laughing at us and enjoying IT folks getting their comeuppance.
I haven't found a way to articulate my thoughts very well on this subject, others do it better even on HN. But coming from a working class family with most of my old school friends from growing up still working blue collar jobs - I can say it's been incredibly uncomfortable listening to the narratives from tech workers on these subjects for 25 years. It's been utterly amazing to me how people switched on a dime within a couple years on the subject now that their livelihoods are on the line. The calls for free markets, pro-automation, "just learn to code", anti-regulation, etc. all instantly changed the moment such folks had even a trivial amount of similar pressure put on them.
Not trying to say you're wrong but long way of saying don't be so hard on yourself, its not like you're Elon, Altman, any of the other awful figures steering our tech world right now.
The analogy wasn't the best, but the whole of tech isn't on the hook for this. Just like a typical daily driver or someone who works on their own car can't be directly responsible for the climate crisis. There are major players making the decisions that are causing the state we're in.
I’m (and presumably many of us are) feeling the destabilizing effects of my industry now in a similar way to how many other professions have felt its effects before. Given our industry’s impact on society, it’s important that we feel this effect directly, so that we can do a better job of empathizing with the industries we’re “disrupting.” Whether or not I have personally participated in those aspects of the industry, I share inescapably in its overall karma, which is why it’s important to not just opt out of the parts of it I feel are immoral, but try to push for it to be better where I can.
This isn't a nit. It changes the way you have to look at this. You can't say "we need to better feel the impacts IT has on the broader workforce, therefore I should avoid working on things that automate jobs away". So long as you take anything resembling a market salary anywhere, you're supplying labor to the system that does that.
Your options therefore are:
* Adopt an ethical stance that doesn't intrinsically penalize work that increases global productivity and thus exerts downward pressure on labor.
* Do work that somehow works against that pressure, for instance by donating 20-40% of your compensation to labor causes, or something like that.
* Leave the industry.
I don't look at this quandry and see an ethical imperative; I look at it and see a broken ethical calculation. From that observation, I get to: "I should shut up about things that impact employment for software developers, because there's nothing intrinsically bad about that."
(Whether or not developers, or dockworkers, come out on net positive or negative is a separable question.)
I've never worked on software that automated someone's job away. But because I'm a programmer at all, it's partially my fault?
I'm not saying you personally set out to take anyone's job away. But our field is unusually well compensated because of its function in the broader marketplace. The point is that moralisms like "fault" don't operate here.
I think this would be very difficult to do as a web-dev. The web itself is a form of global scale automation in-itself.
I am also a self-taught tech nerd. I have not "directly" worked on any specific automation project in terms of "come put this group out of work" - but I can't think of a single project I worked on that wasn't making current processes more efficient and automated - by largely removing remaining manual steps involved. This is why we exist to begin with, otherwise no one would be paying us to do the work.
I wrote software that took server provisioning from a process that involved a tech typing on a keyboard every time, to clicking a button on a webUI to install an OS. A task many here at HN have done just for their home lab environment so as to make their own lives more efficient.
This put zero people out of work. But it probably prevented hiring of at last a handful of low-level technicians over the course of that software's lifecycle. Which is the same thing to an industry at large.
Even stuff as simple as writing code to put up a new post on a company website is contributing towards automating someone's job away.
I have often stated computers are the ultimate robot. They fit in nearly every industry to automate things and make processes more efficient. These are code words for "less human labor needed" - aka less jobs.
I recently used AI to make me a custom song for a silly thing. It put no one out of work and I'd not hire someone to make such a thing. But the fact the tech exists to enable such a thing means its absolutely putting musicians out of work. My trivial usage of the technology is part of what enables it to exist at all and put others out of work. Those devs probably point to things I use it for to pretend it doesn't impact anyone negatively. But what I did with it makes using it for stuff like a 30s advertising jingle even more trivial.
My very first web-dev work in the late 90's to enable a pet store to sell their wares on-line absolutely put folks out of work, even though I could have easily seen it as it enabling a small company to do something they could not have done before.
Same goes for my first "real job" where I was debugging Java Applets for an expense management company. This was in direct competition with the existing industry that did it via paper receipts and phone calls. It put massive numbers of folks out of work if you zoom out to the larger industry, while also enabling many other folks to do things they never could haven even thought to do before.
There are extremely small use-cases along the margins where you won't be using technology that directly competes with an existing industry, I can certainly imagine them but you'd have to go extremely out of your way to ensure you are only in these spaces. I will certainly admit it is unlikely but possible to find a way to make a living in these edge cases while still working within the IT space.
As a hobby? Sure. Easy. Making a living as a web-dev at it over a longtime career? I do find it very difficult to imagine - since that's where the money comes from to pay overhead such as IT folks and programmers.
As an industry ? IT (and especially web tech over the past 30 years) exists to make things more efficient and put entire categories of folks out of work.
Retail investors largely didn't exist. Digital retail trading platforms greatly expanded the pool of retail traders, which actually increases the demand for brokers (as in, people trained for the purpose of facilitating financial transactions). Nobody using Robinhood would have hired a broker. Now, thousands of such people work servicing their accounts.
I have no love to for finance industry, much less fintech; i would accept practically any argument that the finance sector as a whole, or retail trading as an idea, is a bad thing for working class people. But i don't see how creating a whole new market for people that didn't previously exist, and which increases overall demand for the specific specialized labor in question, has removed jobs from the pool in aggregate.
I don't think this applies for example with "well former shop clerks are now Amazon delivery drivers" -- that may well be true (or less than true) but still materially worse for everyone involved, etc.
I just don't accept, as axiom, that every every single technology has had an exclusively negative effect on overall employment prospects.
For clarity, I'm very much a socialist, i have no issue with the idea fundamentally that technology in the hands of capitalists is detrimental to the working class writ large in basically all cases. I just take umbrage with the assumption that it's impossible to work in tech without facilitating such things. Much of my work, I'm happy to say, has been about helping people do their jobs better; it hasn't been directed at making them do more in less time, reduce headcount, or some abstract efficiency. It's been to help people do the jobs they already have to do, more effectively. A job a person still has to do, but can be done less stressfully with help from technology.
I wish every thing I've ever touched was such, admittedly it isn't. But i think there's lots of places where that might still be true: aircraft engineers? Pilots? (Fewer trains i guess but that's mostly a US phenomenon). There are administrative jobs working systems that couldn't exist without "automation" as in they would not have existed before the computer created the system.
Idk. I can be swayed, i just get sick of this implication that people working for a living have influence over their employers. They don't, by design, except for managers maybe (but I'm not and never will be one of those, either)
> But it seems the online encyclopedia is not completely immune to broader trends, with human page views falling 8% year-over-year,
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/18/wikipedia-says-traffic-is-...
Ok so you’re not denying the impact on climate change. Any of the other negative impacts it has on society?
Don’t sweep them under the rug and say, “works for me though so that’s worth it, not a big deal.”
I think the maths is interesting and the research is fascinating. I like computers, programming, and theoretical computer science more perhaps than the average person. That doesn’t mean I’m happy with data centres relying on illegal methane power plants to generate their base load power requirements. I think it’s unethical… and illegal. It seems like regulators are either unable to keep up or are getting paid to not look. That’s unethical. The financial systems used to deploy these data centres are imploding in debt and should also be regulated. They’re going to poison a bunch of retirement funds and could be a major factor in the crash of US bonds. Unethical. If they can’t run a profitable business even when they are bending and cheating and causing all of this harm I don’t think there’s any reason they shouldn’t be left to crash and burn like anyone else.
I don’t have much sympathy for the position of, “yeah that stuff is bad but I like it anyway and don’t want to talk about it.”
You might find more common ground with people if you can recognize the harms it does do, acknowledge that they are bad and advocate for change.
And you might have to give up the idea that any of this technology is going to lead to the creation of science-fiction super intelligent beings. We know what the combination of attention, transformers, and RNN can do. Pretty nifty stuff… but is it worth bleeding an economy of all its resources so that you can simulate f within psi worth it? I don’t think so. Sometimes the answer is, yeah neat but who cares? I’d rather have energy for keeping my cooling on in the middle of this heat wave.
I agree that there are some harms, but they are mostly self imposed. If a retirement fund gambles people's money on the wrong company, that is on them.
Most of the power conflicts are downstream of corrupt politicians and ignorant voters strangling their grid and stymieing efforts to improve production and transmission.
Online if people even smell something they don’t like… it goes bad fast.
Noticed how the proponents of AI are the Musk, Thiel, Palantir, and other, who have wet dreams about authoritarianism, control, and subjuging minorities?
Don't you think there's a reason for this?
Very strange, but I’ve seen the same folks dog pile in for other causes, so I guess it’s just a part of the identity now.
You dont get to benefit from the expansion of companies like Uber, airbnb or meta, then pretend like you were always focused on the success of the average person. You didn't care when you could get ahead, don't pretend like you care now. It's childishly performative. This is an evolution of the same automation and communication tech that has been growing for as long as most people have been alive. Just now it might actually affect the technologically literate class. You did this. Own it.
It’s just that the median tech worker was more often to talk about moving fast and breaking things and making glib statements about buggy whips. If you were the sort of person to just shrug and say that a few leopards were the price of advancement then you’re probably not going to get a lot of sympathy. That is, unless you connect your current faceless state to your previous stance on leopards and admit that maybe you were shortsighted (generic “you” here, not you specifically).
This time the "innovation" is also based on actual theft.
I get what you're saying, that not everyone who is in tech contributed, which is fair to an extent, see my other comments.
Also engineers building stuff to spec are exactly the same thing as venture capitalists
And "engineers building things to spec" are not the same as those giving the orders, but they should take a measure of responsibility for the things they build. I think most people generally agree about the culpability of those following orders when people are harmed. I'm not even saying they should necessarily be held accountable; just that moralizing about it is hypocritical.
All technologies have benefits and costs — choosing and using a technology does not imply the nonexistence of tradeoffs. One can give sufficient consideration to the downsides, and then determine that the upsides outweigh them. It's not rocket science.
I'm not excluding myself from this. Just chafing against this grandstanding by people actively contributing to the same problems, and especially annoyed by the people saying we should pause development because it's going to affect people's jobs. This isn't new.
Edit: I'd also like to point out that "Public cloud computing" doesn't really capture what I said; the OP of the article is specifically building on Amazon, which has a well documented history of worker exploitation. Even building on Azure or Google cloud would be more defensible in the context of the article they wrote.
Last year, AWS did ≥ $100B in revenue across millions of customers. But where do you draw the line exactly? "Everyone who uses < thing > is < problematic >" feels extreme.
Suggesting that nobody is entitled to opinions on one category sounds kinda silly.
How else would they feel morally superior to degenerate techies who finally got what they deserve? Didn't you get the memo? It's all Joe the Java developer who's the impetus of injustice in the world.
The implications of AI aren't as novel as tech circles would like to believe. The same trends in employment and automation have been happening across industries for decades in slightly different forms. This is just the first time it might actually affect the people doing the work, instead of being conveniently separated from their inner circle.
It’s possible that sufficiently advanced “dumb” compilers and tooling could lower demand. Or that the supply of developers outstripped demand - that’s happened in other professions. We always joked about how we’re automating our own jobs. We just happened to live in a period of explosive demand growth for our skill set so it never mattered for us. But it was never guaranteed that growth would continue in perpetuity.
When mentoring a freshly minted dev, I always checked whether or not they were open to career and financial advice. And if they were, I would always make this point to them and tell them to think carefully how much of their massive tech salary they should be spending. I make it a point to keep abreast of what median salaries are for other job roles are viable and moderate my spending and saving accordingly, because there was always a possibility that the gravy train would stop.
That's an awfully wide swath you are cutting there. I can't think of a single tech person that I've worked closely with in the last 20 years that I would describe as "riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale". The majority of tech workers do not work for FAANG, or anything close to it.
I'm all for pushing back against what AI might do, but doing it in this massively dishonest way just opens the door to obvious counters.
Tell me all about how it was worse than the print classifieds that already existed
I'm very curious to hear your take
If you are working for the newspaper, your job is a reaction to the death of the original business, and you are the automation that came in their stead
I was part of the online division of a newspaper. Online classifieds did lose them money, but for my company at least, moving them online was an effort to stop losing all of the money from them.
> you are the automation that came in their stead
Sure. We hired fewer people to answer phones for managing their classified ads, but we hired more people to moderate the site and make sure people weren't posting obscene stuff. And it also employed a handful of software developers.
I'm not convinced it was a total loss. I can't speak to the quality journalism part though
Software ate the world and the techbros were very blatantly unsympathetic about those affected by their industry and careers being upended. Don't think that anyone forgot about that now that we're the ones in the crosshairs.
40-45% of people will get cancer in their lives.
It's estimated that 25-30% of people, globally, enjoy hip-hop.
Cancer is 50% more common than hip-hop.
Is hip-hop normal?
I am saying that when 40-50% of people will experience something, it is statistically very normal. In fact, it's technically "likely".
In most cases, 40% is significantly better than Vegas odds.
Let's not rewrite history, ok? VCs funded and killed professions, and now it's our head on the chopping block. You can always argue that "I just followed orders", and it would be true, but let's not create an impression that everyone working in tech is force of evil working against common people.
If you believe technology and innovation is characterized as “using economies of scale to exploit the average person” you’d necessarily come to some pretty weird positions throughout history.
Take the natural ice trade for example. Were refrigerators an evil means of exploiting and displacing the 100,000 workers who powered the natural ice trade? Or was it a better solution to the public health hazards, brutal dangerous working conditions, and high price paid by society to the Ice Monopoly?
Which is true, on the long term. But we have no reason to believe that AI will be different in that case. In the short term, technologies have absolutely been used to exploit the average person; the industrial revolution benefited us all over time, but tell that to the kids killed in early industrial manufacturing centers.
Look at how the transition to globalization went in the 80's-10's; entire sections of the US were essentially shut down because of the improvements in communication technology, and unless you're in support of the current state of the US, you'd agree we're still dealing with the consequences of that.
Even in your own case, there's an argument to be made that CFCs meant the overall damage to humanity was greater than the ice trade, just spread out over more people. The exploitation was similar, but it was less visible. Even if we've eventually reached a point where people were better off, you can't argue that the health of the average person was never exploited for the benefit of the few.
To be clear, I'm not separating myself from this; I'm fully aware that work I've done has displaced people. I'm just chafing against the moralizing around it. It feels like the people making these arguments are trying to remove themselves from responsibility while continuing to build on top of companies like Amazon, that are built on top of exploiting people that absolutely cannot advocate for themselves.
If your claim is that in the short term there are negatives caused by innovation, then… well yeah! There is no such thing as a free lunch, and it’s exceedingly rare to ever have pure upside in anything ever. Life is a series of trade offs and hard decisions. The Industrial Revolution literally lifted a significant portion of the population out of poverty, and also hurt children in the beginning. I’m very glad we have child labor laws that are strict and well enforced. If your claim is that the Industrial Revolution was a net negative because children died, I would like for you to pull up the chart of child mortality from before and after the Industrial Revolution and go ahead and tell me what you see.
On the other hand, I think lots of people over index on the harms caused because it’s so easy to. You’ve clearly thought at length about quantifying the harm of big tech and your work. But have you ever quantified the positive impact? You can rationalize the tradeoffs of your actions without moralizing the harms you caused.
It’s not okay for children to die in factories, but without those factories far more would’ve died from illness, hunger, etc.
I just believe all of us should be willing to accept our own responsibility for the state of it. I also believe it could eventually work out to be a net benefit to the species; but in the short term, it's going to hurt us badly, as most technological revolutions have. I'm saying everyone involved, directly or indirectly, should be willing to accept their fraction of responsibility for the people who are suffering in the interim, and that moralizing about it is disingenuous.
I'm pretty sure we're not disagreeing at all. Over time, most technological revolutions have benefited society. That doesn't mean they didn't exploit people, though. Even in the current world, there's more slaves than there have ever been. People are still being exploited by technology. It's just more diffuse, and (I'm hoping) the average suffering in the world has gone down.
That is absolute utter nonsense. Like beyond nonsense, much closer to fiction than a differing view of reality. But understandable through a lens that innovation and productivity gains are a means of exploitation. Modern systems and societies are not slavery. They're a default opt-in system of incentives that drive people to contribute more to society if they wish to extract more from it - and we even support a growing class of individuals who contribute far less than they extract, happily.
Unless you're talking about the literal slavery that still happens in developing nations, in which case, there are less total slaves and orders of magnitude less slaves per capita than (I think close to) the majority of written history.
From my perspective you're moralizing against technology in the same silly way people moralize for it, and a significant portion of that is well captured with this one statement: (I'm hoping) the average suffering in the world has gone down. - If you make yourself ignorant to the positive effects of technical innovation and instead view it primarily as a mechanism of exploitation that "eventually very far from now _maybe_ brings benefits", that's no different than making yourself ignorant to the negative effects and viewing it as a mechanism of great benefit to which you should enrich yourself for bringing to the masses and "maybe hurts a few people but everyone benefits so much overall it doesn't matter".
I'll make my position very clear. Technology and innovation are the driving forces of quality of life improvements and are so obviously a moral good for society and mankind. However, innovation is never perfect, so it's necessary to have competent policy makers and governance structures that can regulate away the negative externalities of new systems that innovations can spawn, as rapidly and efficiently as possible.
If you disagree that technology and innovation are inherently an extremely obvious moral good, please look up the following graphs over the last 200 years, noting the year ranges of the industrial era and information age while looking at these graphs. 1. Life expectancy 2. Infant / Child Mortality 3. Extreme Poverty 4. Literacy Rates 5. Average years of schooling 6. Food Supply / Calories Per Person / Crop Yield / Famine Deaths
It's just a parasitic, largely useless, and often actively harmful advertising machine. The only possible positive it has done is transfer a lot of money and capital to employees who often come from middle-class backgrounds.
You’re conflating Meta’s alignment issue with its overall benefit / harm to society. There is a singular, obvious thing that you interact with everyday that is very very bad (unless like me you don’t have it). And the invisible parts of what they do that are extremely beneficial are less obvious.
To be fair say from the list Meta is closest to being a net negative, like they’re the worst of the big tech companies and the only one I would refuse to work at. So I get what you’re saying, but to say they’re largely useless signals that you don’t know what they do and how they impact society at large, other than their very evil algorithms.
The open source stuff is nice and all, but I wouldn't say React, GraphQL, Cassandra, or any of the other stuff is "beneficial to humanity" lol wtf
> facebook marketplace
Craigslist exists, plus other startups were aiming to do that and one would have found its footing if not for Facebook marketplace. Either way, this doesn't make up for any of the negatives people ascribe to Facebook.
> messenger connecting people
This is a fucking joke, as there were and are numerous other instant messaging apps.
> low cost distribution for small business
Yeah, small businesses can have Facebook pages, but this isn't that beneficial. We are talking "extremely beneficial" here, not "some features are useful to some people".
> crises and humanitarian tooling
Yeah I can see it being useful for governments to communicate, but unfortunately outweighed by the misinformation
> abuse/spam/threat detection at scale, etc
Cool that they try to solve problems their platform is susceptible to? They are doing this for themselves and it's proprietary software, isn't it?
IDK what kind of bubble you exist in where people genuinely believe any of the above would constitute "extremely beneficial". Large quantities of people, including those holding down jobs, in the richest country in the world are barely able to put food on the table, people are getting kidnapped by masked Federal agents who are entering homes without warrants, and there are multiple ongoing wars in the world, but, yeah, Facebook, "extremely beneficial", solving the hard problems xd
If you're going to engage in discussion, at least try to interpret the other parties argument charitably. You're wasting both our time replying to the dumbest interpretation of what I said.
Is a 100% local, open-weight model that you only use for learning purposes / generating questions meant just for you the same thing as criticizing the use of "AI" in large corporations replacing workers?
How about DLSS 4 frame gen in a game? That's AI too, and pretty universally seen as neutral or positive by anyone who's aware of it.
How about AI assisting doctors scanning for cancers in medical checkups?
How about running google translate on a street sign when you're in a new country?
Folks gotta be more specific than just saying they're anti-AI, because what does that statement even mean in practice?
> People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment, exploited workers, theft from the people who can least afford it, the impact on people's cognitive skills, the centralisation of power, the spread of disinformation, the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths (not billionaire of course, that's always a safe one), and not endorsing (either distinctly or tacitly by using) AI.
And that argument is always doomed to fail, because you can’t freeze society in amber. Whether it’s the lamplighters, the mule-drawn barge operators, or the scribes… we would do much better to have a social safety net and distributive taxation system so that we all win in Industrial Revolutions.
But we won’t. The skilled artisans that are put out of work from their positions of leverage tend to have the political views of someone with leverage, so instead of communitarian instincts, they want to go back to when they had power.
Agreed.
I don't think it's the out-of-work "skilled artisans" who are to blame though, esp in the US.
A society that promotes risk, plans for failure, and facilitates starting over, all while minimizing wealth inequality is a society that can sprint headlong into every new technology in a way that everyone benefits.
The lining factor I see time and time again, is that folks see the world, philosophically, as static even though in one lifetime we start at the invention of the light bulb and end on the moon, and in the next, we start with the moon landing, and we’ve created artificial thinking with 23 years to spare.
It’s a sad state of affairs. But what do I know, I live in a city with a massive housing crisis because one group finds construction of more homes as ruining their nice static lives.
It's obvious that tons of people have become better at their jobs because of it, it's obvious that it has already saved companies millions of hours. I understand that many don't like the copyright avoiding antics of these big AI companies, but to say that AI is a net negative on humanity is so completely idiotic that it makes me question their character in anything they do moving forward.
Most of the US jobs were lost not to automation, but to outsourcing in pursuit of profits. A similar problem of corporate exploitation, but not so much a technological one.
I'm not saying that as a criticism. I think a lot of people who value a human-made culture are going to drop out of mainstream society in the next decade or so, find each other, and found human-first communities where shared human norms dominate. If AI companies wanted to get ahead of the bad press? They'd help found some of these communities. No strings attached.
What, we can't use AI even to show it's silly and incomplete? How are people supposed to know the ways it's incomplete if we cannot evaluate it?
If you don't think your moral stance is the correct one - then why aren't you changing your moral stance? Why do you have one at all?
It's ok to have strong opinions on morality, and it's cool to live by them, and good to talk about them. I don't happen to completely agree with the author, but I can respect a belief in one's own considered opinion, and the right to express it. No one is being harmed by the author's article.
For example, I have a "strong" moral opinion, which makes many people angry to hear: I don't vote for politicians who arm and enable genocide.
In America, that makes me weird, or worse. I still believe I'm right, and I still talk about it. I firmly believe that cutting out anyone who collaborates on genocide and vetoes ceasefires is the only morally correct move, and happy to talk about why I think that's not just justified and rational but also simply your bare minimum duty as a human being.
That doesn't mean I can't acknowledge that other people feel differently, or that I can't understand where they're coming from with some level of empathy. But it also doesn't mean I have to hang around them. I generally choose not to - genocide enablers squick me out.
The author even explicitly acknowledged that other people have different moral views:
> I will not change my morals or ethics to suit someone else, nor do I expect other people to change theirs.
Along with self awareness and reasonable doubt:
> Does that make me unreasonable? Maybe?
On top of which, the whole diatribe is presented as a "random musing", rather than a demand for you to think differently.
That's not what's asserted.
The title is "To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast"
But the reality is "To have his moral stance is to be a self-imposed outcast".
... And?
I can wholehartedly agree with everything said there, if I mentally replace "AI" with "big tech profitmaxxing using this new tech".
I however, don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater: https://blog.senko.net/how-i-want-to-use-ai
In tech, maybe. Out of tech? No way. A bunch of surveys show that people are mostly negative on AI. For example: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...
Turns out you can have strong opinions about things without it being an issue of morality.
> Students using AI to do homework
Either you don't use AI, where you have to spend a lot of time studying or graduate bottom of your class, or you do and get on with your life. You can acknowledge that the studying is the valuable part (most students do in my experience) yet skip it for whatever reason (procrastination / life issues / etc).
> Teachers using AI to catch AI cheating by students
We've added an extra step to their already overloaded schedules. If they don't do this they're basically encouraging students to cheat this way.
> Translations
You can now easily get a translation with much better accuracy than before (presumably, I'm a monolingual English speaker), but now you aren't talking to any other human beings for this information. This goes for a lot of other knowledge-value work / hobbies too where asking questions is valuable.
IME, everyone I meet offline has some low-level caution about AI taking their job, but uses AI and is amazed by their capabilities and is glad for this tool.
Most ppl I meet online are strong anti-AI advocates.
I've been vegetarian for over 30 years, on moral (environmental) grounds. It does put me in the minority. But I don't expect others to change their behavior.
If you want to avoid AI, avoid AI. If you feel strongly enough that you want to avoid entire companies or corners of the internet, great. These are just the side effects of having a strong opinion.
I read the article, and at worst it could be called whinging, but at its lowest point it never came across as trying to push a view point on the reader. What am I missing?
You have to follow your own moral compass and do what's workable. If you're compelled to take a stand, take a stand. Just know that you can't force other people to change their morals. People who follow this line of thought to its extreme end up killing people who disagree with them. This is how you get everything from anarchist bombings to civil wars.
Personally I think car culture is more damaging than data centers and the threat of super intelligence, but I'm not willing to kill anyone over any of it.
> I accept the models were trained on stolen data.
"Stolen" is a moral stance that not everyone agrees with.
> I accept that the data was labeled by exploited workers.
Yes - and you just ordered DoorDash, which delivered food made by exploited workers and delivered by exploited workers. In fact, almost every convenience you enjoy is the result of some level of exploitation. That doesn't mean it's morally right, but if your outrage is pointed at GenAI (one of the technologies that can potentially level the playing field and remove some amount of exploitation) at the exclusion of these other things, you are simply rage farming.
> I accept the environmental costs of the data centers running these models.
No, they are totally overblown, and if you actually cared about any of these environmental issues, you would realize that data centers are not even in the top 100 things to be concerned about: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
> I accept that I am outsourcing some of my skills to a company.
No, I am outsourcing boring grunt work and using my skills in more meaningful and exciting ways.
> I accept these companies don’t have a viable business model.
Yes, I accept that, and if they fail I'll use another company's models. This technology isn't going away - why as a consumer do you care if one of the providers goes out of business?
> I accept that I am granting more power to big tech and their vision for the world.
I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 20-30 years ago.
> I accept that I am granting more power to the United States.
I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 80 years ago.
> I accept that all this effort could have been spent elsewhere.
It's not clear to me yet that the effort was poorly spent - who knows where AI will go, and what great things might potentially come from it?
> Yes - and you just ordered DoorDash, which delivered food made by exploited workers and delivered by exploited workers. In fact, almost every convenience you enjoy is the result of some level of exploitation. That doesn't mean it's morally right, but if your outrage is pointed at GenAI (one of the technologies that can potentially level the playing field and remove some amount of exploitation) at the exclusion of these other things, you are simply rage farming.
You could have made the same point without the baseless accusation of bigotry. But even if it's true, it would still be the "You think we should improve society, yet you live in it" meme in action. Exploitation is not a binary state (some workers are exploited worse than others), and if the author believes that AI will broadly lead to much more/worse exploitation, watering down their actual point would only make their stance less likely to be heard.
And if they mentioned DoorDash workers, would you actually be satisfied? Or would you be looking for the next group of exploited workers that aren't included?
As vegans and vegetarians (and decades earlier, non-smokers) have shown, you can have a principled stance on something without forcing that stance on others. Yes, it sucks. Yes, your impact will be smaller. But it’s a lot easier to maintain than to break off contact with a friend who dares ask ChatGPT a question.
Would you be friend with Goebbels, knowing he has some different stances than you on some subjects?
If you truly believe something is evil, i think that is difficult. Like imagine if someone said, i believe murder is wrong but i dont want to force that on others. Or, i dont really like slavery but that's just me and others should be slave owners if they feel that is right.
Obviously there is a spectrum of moral ills, and not all are created equal, but if you truly believe something is abhorent, you can't be a good person and tolerate it in others
It’s just a brain fart to make you cooperate and evolutionary survive. You don’t need to listen to this primitive instinct. You can just choose consciously what you think is the best.
Do not share or propagate or promote this view however. Our society only works thanks to most people being slaves to these tremors.
Sometimes I get an impression that it isn’t even a freedom of choice, some must perceive themselves as "good people" as a highest imperative. Whatever that means for current century.
I like to view myself as grey person.
If everyone defects, the system breaks down. Morality is good and it is actually logical - it solves the prisoners dilemma and pushes cooperation instead of defection. It also reduces harm and has lots of other good properties. I feel that how we affect others matters, but even if you're just a sociopath doing the math, defecting is a strategy that burns things down at scale, not a smart one. Tit for tat with forgiveness is not only morally aligned, but also more prosperous in scenarios that aren't just one-off interactions with strangers.
You must be aware though that some people will stab you in the back if the reward is bigger than widely understood consequences. I mean no wonder society is wired to hate that, this is a true critical code execution vulnerability that will never be patched.
This is also the reason why we have decentralised governance systems such as democracy. It isn’t about preventing psychopaths, it’s about pitting them against each other.
It’s not about having zero bombs. It’s about having enough bombs to destroy everything if someone drops a single one.
That’s the pattern and framework of how to tame warring monkeys into skyscraper builders.
When an earthquake forms a mountain it doesn’t do this consciously from what we know. The same is true for skyscrapers. Of course on an individual level there is an illusion of signing papers, a development plan. But what really happened was two ambitions colliding in massive clash and the resulting force just so happens to point up in the sky.
Which is why we have jails.
Become part of the system, get it to work for you. Seems like very popular hobby in some circles
Society is a dynamic system with lots of forces acting on it. Everything is balanced with various controls to stop any one person from taking too much advantage.
Yes, and that’s my point. Most vegans truly believe that meat equals murder. Yet the vast majority of them will go out for dinner with people they truly deeply believe are (indirect) murderers. This is indeed very difficult for them.
Locking yourself out of society isn’t likely to help achieve any sort of moral progress.
On the contrary, i think most moral progress (albeit also many social ills) has been wrought through social pressure.
I think a good example are religious movements (obviously i dont want to equate religion with morality, but often they come with certain moral views attached). They start as a minority, and either they die or they take over. Christianity was a minority at one point.
it depends of course on the cost of compliance. halal food is fine, because everyone can eat it. a minority of vegans could not force restaurants to stop serving meat because that would in turn exclude the majority of meat eaters.
this example just came to mind from my observations. i didn't check any statistics other than the religions in the region. also i just realize, i don't remember seeing this in singapore, which also has a 15% muslim population. so yeah, it looks like you are right, and it is a bad example after all.
Probably the most we can hope to do at this point is to dismantle the surveillance architecture. "Starve the beast" so to speak.
I propose the J Edgar Hoover heuristic. Would X be something you'd want Hoover to have access to? If not, then don't build it.
It's only the software devs with a different experience and they're over-represented in online comment sections. Also because the software devs have no lives and only talk to other software devs they're out of touch with the vast majority of people who fucking hate this shit now.
Coding skills will decline indeed, like math skills of bookkeepers declined when they started using computers. But other skills come in their place too.
Numerous problems with it, but fundamentally a lot of their objections could apply to any post-internet tech. It seems like they just don't like AI.
Writer should also entertain the possibility that it turns out they just don't like tech, and AI just makes a lot of the negative aspects of tech more obvious.
From https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...:
> *112. Having considered the issues of responsibility and governance of AI, we must now return to our central question: what does it mean to safeguard our humanity? The risk extends beyond the misuse of certain technologies. More gravely, the pervasive technocratic paradigm in which we are immersed, and that is amplified by the digital revolution and AI, threatens to normalize an anti-human vision. In that vision, the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control. When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.*
But the actual benefits for society are honestly underwhelming. Yes, we can code faster now -- but was there a serious problem with humanity being unable to produce enough code fast enough? We can write emails faster, and summarize documents much faster -- ok, yes, that does make some people more productive, myself included. But yeah, email also made us more productive than typewriters, which made us more productive than hand-written letters. LLMs might uncover medical discoveries that humans just couldn't on our own? Uh, maybe? I mean we've had ML/DL models for a while and they're getting better.
And then you consider the way that AI is being implemented, developed, invested in, and pushed, by large corporations, whatever benefits there could be from LLMs, are highly outweighed by the negative effects on society as a whole. It is a highly destructive force in almost every area. It could be a force for good, but at the rate we're going, it will not be, because that's not the profitable path.
Nuclear fission was an amazing scientific discovery as well! And yet if it weren't for strict regulations, international treaties, UN-verification agencies, major protests against nuclear weapons etc., there's a pretty good chance that millions would have died by now by some nuclear weapon. (In addition to the hundreds of thousands who did die by nuclear fission in Nagasaki and Hiroshima -- which makes you wonder if the discovery of nuclear fission was worth it at all.) (Ah, but nuclear-backed MAD prevents conventional wars that might have killed millions anyway! Yes, that argument has some merit but I'm certainly not convinced. I'm old enough to remember feeling like we were literally a button-press away from destroying much of humanity. The weird thing is that we still are, we just don't think about it much because it hasn't happened yet.)
Nevertheless, I'm optimistic that an LLM will be developed sooner or later that is fully aware of the open-source ecosystem and can create software in the correct way: This would involve using pre-existing code and reviewed modules that are plugged together and optimised to create as little new code as possible while reusing as much open-source code as possible.
This post sounds like selfishness/self-preservation masquerading as concern for humanity and the environment. You can be anti-AI all you want. You're wasting your breath and energy.
I don't know if the quality of my life has gone up because I have these tools that help me build things in exchange for less job prospects.
All I know is: it's not up to me, I don't get to choose, and I have to adapt to the situation. I don't bitch about it and condemn others for doing the same.
Call me bitter. These are the same people who have been decrying and arguing with me that AI would never get where it is now. Stop your kicking and screaming already. It's not helping anyone.
That's how Russia got into current situation, btw.
It’s the best scenario for AI to be like these robots from Star Wars forever. Silly, barely competent, comic relief. So, so much better than any doomer-philosopher blogpost.
LLM will always be clumsy, endearing, silicone regard unable to function without commands. I only worry about the jepa
GUYS
PLEASE
The impact of ai on the enviroment is one of the dumbest psyops in history, how can you claim to know start with that after claiming you know the technology and what it is doing?
There are hundreds of reasons to hate ai but this is just NOT it
But the degree of data center buildout and resource use, if exponential growth just continues a little longer, is going to end up being a big number. AI datacenters are already stretching electrical power grids and increasing peaker power plant use.
Data centers right now are about 5% of electricity use in the US. AI could easily double that share.
Even if the bubble were to pop, i feel like the worst that could happen is that we would have a bunch of inactive datacenters that could be switched on to meet demands of the growing internet. Kind of like how nuclear plants operate.
cmiiw to think along these lines though.
- AI datacenters are gold-rush rush jobs with interesting things like their own gas turbine generators etc.
- It's not clear that serving the internet needs us to double the amount of datacenter footprint. If anything, a lot of workloads are getting more power and space efficient.
- Most expensive thing is that we're filling them full of GPUs and with RAM tied up to the GPUs. That's infrastructure that we've paid the resource costs for and it's difficult to repurpose to something else.
I do think AI is going to grow a lot, so I'm not sure how much of the buildout will need repurposing. But I do think doubling our datacenter footprint and doing it in environmentally yucky ways will probably have some lasting effects and consume a lot of resources.
If it's not, then more of the thing ends up being done than is socially optimal.
E.g. artificially cheap agricultural water -> lots of water-heavy crops being produced like alfalfa and exported for less than the cost of the water.
I think we might disagree about the degree to this is true, but I think most of us can agree that the true cost of energy is not completely included in its price.
I mean, email and Hacker News and Netflix use water, too.
If you talk about using AI on Twitter, Threads, Mastodon or Bluesky, you will often get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using AI on many subreddits or Discord servers you will get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using it on many forums (especially software engineering and modding ones), you will start a flame war at best.
Even sites which would logically be more corporate friendly (like say, LinkedIn) have a lot of people who hate AI and all those that use it.
So I'm not sure that disliking AI necessarily makes you an outcast here. Yeah, you're not going to get along with its advocates, and there are quite a few companies and organisations that support it.
But there are also a lot of places that despise it's very existence, and where being a critic of AI is the normal, 'mainstream' view.
imo we've been living out a decade or more of the Doorman Fallacy ( https://www.jaakkoj.com/concepts/doorman-fallacy ) where people are just liquid labour with some minimum constraints to distinguish them from chattel, where the ironic effect is everyone gets treated like they are chattel but for these minimum requirements. Maybe this will move the concerns and opinions class to act to conserve some of our cultural capital base?
mostly i am not sympathetic to the author because we are not of the same tribe, but the essential argument that there's something to conserve that we arent with AI is a worthy concern. we should look less at problems and solutions and more upstream of what we want to preserve and still grow.
That doesn't mean everyone shares my views outside of those contexts, I just don't feel any more an outcast than for having my own view on other issues.
I believe people do understand the toll caring about something deeply takes -- but caring about all these things at once, many which you personally can't control, feels more like atlas syndrome or compassion fatigue by the author.
I also find the author a bit all-or-nothing in general. Losing friends because they use AI? Why does the dichotomy have to be so black and white? Can people have moral quandaries about AI while still using it, or does the moral stance always have to be absolute?
The web is only about 30 years old and has never existed in some fixed, ideal state. Sure, it’s noisier and increasingly full of AI-generated slop, but are we already at the “everything was better in the old days” stage?
As for the destruction of career paths, technological change has been doing that for centuries. Digitization alone transformed or eliminated countless professions. I’d be curious what the authors’ moral stance is on those disruptions. Is the concern specifically about AI, or about technological progress more generally?
I put this blog under the old grumpy man file for now.
Sure it did.
You are so consumed, with absolute certainty, of the permanent and eternal correctness of your moral position, that you literally say you would rather throw away personal connections to human beings than be triggered by the presence of ideas or things.
Please reconsider. I'm not even going to try to persuade you that you're wrong about AI because it isn't even relevant. The truth is that if you carry out your plan, you will just end up being an incredibly hurtful person towards a lot of folks who probably have no idea why you are abandoning them and now feel isolated, hurt, and confused.
Also, ask yourself how sure you are, that you're going to be right for all time, about AI, which is a brand-new technology. Maybe you know yourself. Your views seem incredibly rigid and perhaps you really will never change your mind no matter what AI becomes. But if you ever have changed your mind about anything ever, again, please consider whether the harmful course of action you are describing is worth the extraordinary harm you seem eager to effectuate on everyone who disagrees.
Honestly I don't know why I bothered typing out of any of this. I doubt the author cares. I just wish people like this author would consider that their words and actions do actual harm to real people. And, by the way, zero harm to the progress of AI. Just hurtful and dumb.
There are many instances where I have seen Wikipedia have bias, or be misinformation.
AI just needs the caveat that it is not really intelligent, but a very good predictive text machine, which you should always ask to provide citations.
It doesn't know what it is doing.
Anyways, people looking for drama will find one
Usually the objection is that "oh well, the computer can be used for many great things", which isn't particularly satisfying because, um, we can use AI for "good" (better?) things as well (e.g. trying to find novel cures, unlocking the mysteries of protein folding, etc etc).
Then the objection becomes something like "well the computer is here and we have to live with it", which is also now true of AI. Do I like the "it's inevitable" argument; no, but it's clearly very true that we do have the transformer, that won't go away - where we DO have control (or should seek to change) is the organisational structures that we as a society decide to create, and how we safeguard the dignity of the individual in changing times.
The fact that some people opt out of engaging with AI, I think is healthy for society as a whole. If that's within their control and they exercise their control to do what they think is right, then I commend them.
That said, I do think there is a greater natural force at play, something involving entropy and increasing complexity and energy profit maximization. It seems to cut through all levels of abstraction from organic chemistry to civilizations and probably beyond. I assume this is outside of humanity's control, and therefore outside of any individuals control.
So what is inside our control? Our own perceptions and actions.
My perception is that the advance of computation and by extension proliferation of probabilistic programs (AI) is inevitable. It's on a continuum that is a force of nature.
What I might have some control over is choosing to harness that potential to increase future prosperity for more people and the greater environment, and to avoid contributing to outcomes that harm people and the environment.
Lots of bad things are happening and will happen that are outside my control.
I do genuinely believe that the capabilities are inherently neutral. Civilization can choose to harness them in a variety of ways, for a variety of purposes.
If the majority of people choose options that are game theory win-win, then the future will be better... If the majority of people choose win-lose, then the future will probably be worse.
The risk isn't AI, it's how we choose to use it.
However. For _programming_, they actually are shockingly useful. Like I'm actually shocked that models in 2026 do useful programming for me where 2024 models definitely could not. They still need babysitting, definitely. I see with my own eyes people with less programming knowledge accepting awful output without consideration. But in the hands of an expert, there are actually now programming tasks i prefer to do with an LLM, which i genuinely never thought would happen.
Basically if it were me, the societal impacts of the "art" and the chatbots are clearly awful, cheapening creative cultural work, replacing it with hideous slop, and preying on the mentally unwell driving many of them to self harm, and i think these products should be taken off the market. But coding agents, specifically? It's getting harder to imagine life without them. Idk if it's possible to have one without the other, not that it matters, it's not up to me, it's up to sama, and he loves preying on the unwell and destroying culture
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
So, just like with crypto, there are people inside the bubble who simply believe they're going to get rich off of whatever is happening. So instead of seeing the flaws or the exploitation, they see a system where ultimately they will benefit from it. In crypto, you saw people who missed out on Bitcoin so kept looking for the next Bitcoin in everything that came after. That's why rug pulls worked.
AI is just accelerating a trend where a few thousand people are increasingly owning everything. Automation (including AI) will just be used to further concentrate wealth. We will be minting trillionaires when the majority of the world can barely afford to live.
But there are people inside the bubble who don't see that or don't care because they think they will get rich so none of that will affect them. It's not even that intentional. A lot of people see poverty as a personal moral failure. So it's just that they view themselves as not having that moral failure.
A more realistic view is that not everyone can be Jeff Bezos. You're more likely to win the lottery than you are to end up a billionaire. Also, you're one bad day away from being unable to work. Medical event, accident, whatever. This is why we look after the most vulnerable in society because you could be one of them one day.
Oh, you're not smart enough to know how to write your own code? You need your hand to be held? You need to write your little prompts because reading documentation is too hard? I'll keep my skills while your brain turns to mush.
Author: Goes on to demonstrate superficial (mis)understanding of the technology by proliferating misconceptions peppered with anecdata and heavy virtue signaling and calling it a blog post.
Hmm, okay, then...
Is anyone else annoyed by this kind of ironically [^1] weak thinking / writing that conflates: (1) one's own personal opinions and biases however long-standing or irrelevant; (2) limited working knowledge of the actual technology; and (3) virtue signaling / moral posturing / etc? ... and then ultimately just stirs that all up in a pot to not actually say anything more substantial than "AI bad". It's such an overstated, bland, lifeless, useless, uninteresting, intellectually lazy take.
Clutching onto a weak opinion, strongly held [^2] does not make one an "outcast" ... it just comes off as closed-minded and melodramatic. Is that even contrarian? Being on the majority side of an unnuanced opinion is about as far away from being an outcast as possible...
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Very few of the moral panic type issues those vehemently opposed to LLMs are raising repeatedly are really unique to that field... because why? [Because LLMs are not the problem.]
- Where was said moral posturing when we were building the cloud computing infrastructure?
- Where is the concern of "wasting" compute resources when using 10–15 GB of bandwidth to stream a 90-min movie in 4k?
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[^1]: Better not call the poorly written human authored post of poor quality "slop" though!
[^2]: Not a typo.
Having a moral stance is good, but isolating yourself rather than fighting for it and then complaining about being an outcast is utterly puzzling.
Other people do understand AI sucks and are even anti ai while still using it… personally I have been anti tech forever (When it comes to privacy, bot misinformation, psychological health, all of it) but yeah dude I still use it and have a job in it bc it’s paying bills and it supports our family and there are some good things about it it’s not all bad.
In terms of actually trying to create a revolution in tech (unionizing, making change, ending it, whatever you think) I would love to see the bad things go but I don’t see it being possible. It’s like saying: I don’t like cars (and I’m better than everyone else bc I walk) bc cars are bad for the environment and people die STOP DRIVING CARS… there’s absolutely no way people are going to stop driving cars.
A couple of days ago I started having watery eyes and suddenly 'pink eye' was a term in DeepSeek with all the answers, viral, bacterial and fungal which I didn't know. According to symptoms it was a bacterial type so Tobramycin was the answer, the dose, the care. Two days later and cured even though I have to continue treatment for at least six days as directed by AI. It's not a miracle, just science at your fingertips, human knowledge put to good and bad use, pick your side.
I totally welcome our new AI overlords.
> What's wrong about AI tracking a license plate crossing every corner with your kidnapped daughter?
Very subtle.
Now, if AI leads to global ruin/... obviously some people will be able to say "See! I knew this would happen!", but again, at this point it feels AI is no worse morally than the existing allocation of upside/downside that big-techgopolies have had for at least the last decade.
If your company's goal is to generate "more useless text" they would have done it with or without AI. AI just let's the peons responsible for producing that text do so significantly faster, with some percentage loss in "quality" baked in. Are you mad their jobs are easier? Was their text once not useless and now it is?
Again, it's like saying the conveyor belt is evil because it lets us generate more useless toys/candy/guns/... and research into improving the conveyor belt should instead be going toward more valuable things. However it ALSO has those effects on EVERYTHING. It lets you produce more drugs, books, food, clothes, necessities, and yes, some useless items too.
Same with AI. Sure you can use it to spew cat pictures, but you can also use it to generate significant quantities of non-trivial useful (not necessarily bullet proof, but undoubtedly _useful_) output in a fraction of the time and/or HUMAN capital (butts-in-seats, time-on-task, ...) than before. Now, as always, value is in the eye of the beholder (which is why your C suite gets giddy at all the useless text output).
But the article places more stress on arguments of the sort "It's evil to use AI because it doesn't work very well", and those don't seem very logical to me. Oh, SOME arguments of that kind make sense, e.g. in the area of autonomous weapons, but the author didn't focus on extreme cases such as those.
Terence Tao is more credible to me than the views OP expresses in this heart felt, well intentioned but outdated essay.
It's only the software devs with a different experience and they're over-represented in online comment sections. Also because the software devs have no lives and only talk to other software devs they're out of touch with the vast majority of people who fucking hate this shit now.
Every time I criticize the Vikings on The Ultimate Vikings Enthusiast-and-Reenactment Society web forums, they downvote me too. It's ridiculous. Don't they have any integrity? Do they not believe in freedom of speech? One guy even started to rant about how the subforum's topic was specifically about a torment where the vikings would cut out of a man's tongue with a red hot knife... what does that have to do with my first amendment rights? just unbelievable.
Where did you get that idea? Capability isn't in question. Intelligent, well-informed on the subject, positioned to see issues, problems, and drawbacks first. They spend most of their waking hours chewing over every tiny detail.
They just don't want to. It'd be like asking a paleontologist why they hate dinosaurs. And if you can't see that, then I don't know how to explain it to you in a way that will ever make sense. On 4chan, they'd say something along the lines of "not your army", and that goes the same here. We're not your army to mobilize against AI. Nothing will ever change that. Somehow though, you think our positions are reversed, but they're not. I'm comfortable here, I'm comfortable with the zeitgeist and everyone's attitude on the subject, it's you that seems to be in distress. I don't want anything from you and I don't need your help.
You can be a very principled person resisting and spotlighting norms you strongly disagree with, but how you do it tends to matter a lot. It makes the difference between people opening an ear to listen to you and reflexively pushing you away as an annoyance.
People who did engineering studies often think that "tech is pure", it's a simple "knowledge field" where something is "true or not". That's completely wrong. Tech is indissociable from society
But engineers don't understand that. Only researchers (and militants) do
This has played out a million different ways throughout history, nothing special about this case, it just happens to be rooted in anxiety about AI.