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Comment by Silagi | Hacker News Reader

Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.

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.

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> It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.

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.

And you're cutting an awfully wide swath in the opposite direction; most tech gains value by exploiting or displacing people. Economies of scale don't just exist at the absolute top of the economy. The computer cut out entire classes of people from jobs they had specialized in by decreasing the education or effort required to successfully complete tasks, at the cost of massively increased infrastructure costs.

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.

Name any tech job and I will tell you how it exploits the average people through economies of scale

I cut my teeth in tech building a regional classifieds website for a local newspaper

Tell me all about how it was worse than the print classifieds that already existed

I'm very curious to hear your take

Not the original poster, but moving classifieds online lost newspapers a whole lot of money, money that previously financed quality journalism, not to mention the people in charge of maintaining the classifieds ads business.

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

> moving classifieds online lost newspapers a whole lot of money

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

Surely you jest. How often have we seen tech types say "learn to code", suggesting that people whose careers are disrupted just retrain into a different career, telling businesses to adapt or die (pre-LLM), or make condescending analogies about buggy whip makers on HN and /. before it? Quite a lot over the past 20 years.

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.

You're looking a massive selection bias. Most people in tech are _not_ saying those things (e.g. most software engineers in my circle would agree learning to code at a non trivial level is decidedly NON trivial). The vocal elite at the top of the tech pyramids (who have a vested interest in sweeping externalities under the rug) are the ones spewing that shit.

Some of us have loathed Uber, Airbnb & Meta. Are we allowed to be negative about AI?

It's not a matter of being "allowed" per se. What the parent is saying that people need to do a better job being internally consistent in their beliefs and moral stances. If you are one such person, great! But my impression is that most people aren't.

Sure. I think that I’d you were expressing concerns about all the leopards running around and having discussions about whether we need to do something about the leopard population, it’s perfectly reasonable to be upset when a leopard eats your face.

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).

It's weird for physicists to complain about nuclear weapons. They did it. Own it.

Most do, in my experience? I worked at Argonne for a while, and they absolutely treated their profession with deadly seriousness. I didn't meet anyone who took the stance of "Move fast and break things". Most spent too many late nights rechecking their work to make sure it was correct. Even when being wrong would be entirely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

I get what you're saying, that not everyone who is in tech contributed, which is fair to an extent, see my other comments.

Economies of scale is how society lowers the cost of meeting the demand for things people want. Uber, Airbnb, and Meta have negative externalities that have gone “unpriced” in the market because our policy makers are incompetent. But at large, they’ve net benefitted society, many more times over than they’ve hurt anyone whose job was displaced from the cycle of innovation and those individuals have found new jobs, or adapted to compete (taxis making a comeback, except they’re not fucking scumbags anymore because they don’t have a monopoly).

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?

I vehemently disagree that meta or airbnb have done more to benefit society than not, but I'll take the overall argument; that technology, on the whole, benefits society overall.

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.

We agree for the first few sentences! I’m a huge proponent for AI displacement taxes because of the rapid pace of acceleration and a lack of confidence that our economies reabsorption mechanisms are adequate.

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 think we're roughly on the same side here? I'm explicitly against moralizing about AI by people who benefit from other forms of tech exploitation, e.g. using Amazon for hosting; I'm not against the idea of AI as a whole; I think it's an inevitability.

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.

Yes, I think we have the same beliefs largely - my point is that the lens of economies of scale == exploitation is a very silly one that would naturally lead to conclusions such as "Even in the current world, there's more slaves than there have ever been."

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

I am not weighing in on the fundamental issue you are debating with the other person, but clearly Facebook has provided no benefit to society lol wth

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.

Meta’s primary issue is an alignment problem. They’ve built the most valuable human connection network ever and then added a misaligned algorithm on it.

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.

...so, what is this thing they do, that in your view is "extremely beneficial"?

All of their open source work, facebook marketplace, messenger connecting people, low cost distribution for small business, crises and humanitarian tooling, abuse/spam/threat detection at scale, etc.

Quite a stretch.

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

I am at least objective in my criticism. I'm not going to reply to 5 different emotionally charged strawman arguments, especially because I don't care to defend Meta.

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.

You gave one sentence statement to try to explain why you think the company does anything that would count as "extremely beneficial" (your words), and it's just a list of stuff you didn't bother to elaborate on (including, laughably, Facebook Messenger, as if anyone could possibly count that as "extremely beneficial"). You didn't even make a cogent argument.

Indeed. This paragraph from the post could have just been written about the internet and all of the tech and companies it has enabled since ~1999:

> 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.

Automobiles, steam trains, even electricity or the printing press… There has always been a compelling argument for ludditism, the protection of people in that moment (as if that moment would last forever).

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.

> 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.

Agreed.

I don't think it's the out-of-work "skilled artisans" who are to blame though, esp in the US.

Obviously there is no “blame” in complex systems, but over and over, folks with financial leverage tend to move immediately from a position of libertarian meritocracy to a position of regressive intervention at exactly the moment when their skill becomes automated.

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.

If someone who has never had any major financial benefit from tech, but loved it all the same, criticizes AI, do they get a pass?

Depends what part of AI they say they don't agree with. Anyone with a reasonable, sound argument can give it a shot.

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?

Partially correct. But the massive investments of capital, environmental resources, etc. are in some cases specific to modern AI, and some of the objections are specific to those. Ditto the overlapping issue of global intellectual property appropriation. (Much of what LLMs do is refactor what people posted on the web for free.)

It is the exact same capital that paid all of our salaries for the last 20 years

You make a good point; but the scale of destruction is by no means the same now.

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.

Most people don't work for Uber, Meta or AirBnB and these companies have been criticized forever in tech forums.

This time the "innovation" is also based on actual theft.

This is like saying cancer is perfectly normal.

Is cancer not normal?

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?

So you're saying, you don't mind having cancer?

I didn't say that. I didn't even come close to saying that.

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.

That's why almost no one notable in tech (both software and hardware) is taking this stance, or still has this stance with the current state of LLMs. Even the extremely talented devs who personally don't use LLMs don't have this extremist take that LLMs and AI tools are morally evil (??).

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.

> Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.

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.

People are never ever ever allowed to realize maybe sometimes bad things are bad once the chickens come home to roost. An antisocial belief they held fifteen years ago needs to define them forever, because people are just machines for receiving guilt and wrath, they can’t learn anything from suffering personally, or if they can here’s why it’s bad anyway.

Also engineers building stuff to spec are exactly the same thing as venture capitalists

More specifically, someone actively building on top of Amazon decrying the exploitation of workers and the environment is demonstrably hypocritical.

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.

"Anyone who uses < public cloud computing > is hypocritical" is a pretty insane take, even for HN.

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.

Sure, but those people who "considered the downsides" shouldn't then moralize about the exploitation of workers; they're contributing to it. It's explicitly hypocritical. They're explicitly deciding the exploitation is worth the upsides for their or their company's benefit.

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.

I generalized the statement from one cloud to big public clouds categorically to show by hyperbole that ... what difference does it make?! [One can find analogous critiques of Azure, GCP, etc.]

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.

I could even agree with “is problematic” although I don’t see it as black and white, but “is problematic and therefore doesn’t get to comment / needs to own this / did this” is definitely not a legitimate critique of the critical discourse.

I don’t think they’re trying to imply that at all. But arguing that it’s bad without a mea culpa comes across as inauthentic.

Who's "they", the vast majority devs work for non tech companies doing very boring shit. We're not all hellbent on making the most $$$ while burning the world down like the silicon valley degenerates

The boring shit is still about eliminating labor that would have had to be done without computers. Automation is a core value of computing, back to automated switchboards and census tabulation.

Make Neo-Luddism Great Again! /s

There are about ten billion relevant and reasonable ways to differentiate and choose priorities in all of that.

Suggesting that nobody is entitled to opinions on one category sounds kinda silly.

> 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.

I'm specifically saying "I'm entitled to displace people with automation built on previous work, but automation that affects me shouldn't be allowed" is a particularly hypocritical take.

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.

I very much agree with this position. And it didn’t even have to be AI.

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.

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