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Comment by spicymaki | Hacker News Reader

I am genuinely fascinated by this.

I don’t like piling on especially with security vulnerabilities, but man how many red flags do you need to ignore?

They won’t stop abusing us until we stop using their products.

I think my first clue was when their CEO hired a bunch of teenage hackers to sack the government and exfiltrate all our data.

I didn't really need a second clue.

It's not a subtle pattern.

Most people don’t know about that because they live in an information bubble handcrafted by the oligarchs.

My first clue was when he libelled the diver during the Thailand thing in 2018; it was all downhill from there.

...it was quite the sting because I bought a Tesla car only 2 weeks prior to that.

Lazy or incapable people will do almost anything once it is normalized behavior, which vibe coding has become, to avoid having to do actual work. Even if there were cryptominers running, eating up 80% of their cores and stealing electricity, they would still let it happen. It's not their money or hardware being spent.

> They won’t stop abusing us until we stop using their products.

I don't use AI at all in my daily life.

Work however will demand you use it.

AI is not here to help people.

Nothing about this has anything to do with AI. It has to do with Musk's ethical and engineering standards, or the lack thereof.

AI is created by big tech stealing other people's data. Yes, this has everything to do with AI - stealing data is a foundational feature of the technology.

It's more about billions at stake and the nature of AI business. You either score big, or go belly up with diminishing funding.

Well let's be fair here - you either go belly up with diminishing funding or get bailed out (maybe by the government, maybe by private funds that themselves expect to be bailed out by the government).

There currently is no path towards profitability, it's just a question of whether you can grab funding before it dries up.

Let's be fair, "no path to profitability" was common topic around Facebook IPO because people didn't undertand that free service means that their personal data is the product.

Viable AI companies will one get to profit. Firms layoff qualified people because AI is much cheaper. Now there's no easy turning back, so if AI service increase prices by 50%, well you don't have option.

Not gonna argue about the utility of AI, but isn't the statement "AI is not here to help people" completely meaningless? AI itself is not "here" for anything; the problem is big tech doing big tech shit as always, not the current technology they're doing it with.

Doesn't matter. Big tech is not changing anytime soon. So if we see AI, we shouldn't see as some random tool, but as something in their hands.

Isn't this objection itself completely meaningless? I'll assume GP wasn't referring to AI having conscious thoughts and deciding to "be here" for a specific purpose, but as technology introduced to achieve an effect.

For example: seat belts are here to help people (by reducing the severity of injuries & the likelihood of fatalities).

> AI is not here to help people.

True, but it isn't here to not help people, either.

It's a spanner. Who wields the spanner, makes all the difference.

We've spent the last couple of decades, cultivating a huge crop of ultimate scumbag billionaires, with comically exaggerated sociopathy, and that has filtered down to almost every level of society. They are treated as gods, these days (they certainly think of themselves that way).

It still shocks me (but really shouldn't), on a daily basis, to encounter regular folks, interacting in stores and restaurants, or driving on roads, that mirror the values systems exemplified by our billionaires. Our politicians act that way, and one of their biggest selling points, is normalizing sociopathy (not just the US, either).

It's a spanner where every quarter turn costs noticeable money. Which directly funds behavior like this.

The tool analogy is intentionally minimizing, and doesn't capture just how different rented tools with constant surveillance are.

Doesn’t absolve the spanner-wielder from responsibility, though.

We live in an age, where the mere thought of personal Responsibility is terrifying.

Yes, I mean it in the sense that the spanner itself and who the spanner funnels money to is so bad that anyone using it has automatically accepted themselves being that bad. Unlike most tools (which the tool analogy leans on heavily), it's very much not an impartial tool, there is no such thing as "using it responsibly" when you're paying Musk.

Wasn't ai introduced so replace people? It's not the spanner, it's the car and we're the horses

Nah. It was introduced to push tech, but if you're a billionaire, then it was introduced to make you richer. They don't especially care, whether or not that involves replacing people.

Replacing people is what C-suiters think of it (and many of them aren't billionaires).

Exactly. I couldn't have said it better. I hope I will still live to see the pitchforks coming out and taking all of this crap down, but I fear it might be longer than a lifetime, before we rid ourselves of these parasites.

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