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Comment by blueSky1989 | Hacker News Reader

blueSky1989

My favorite paragraph from Zuckerberg's writeup:

""" [...] it is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom. I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future. The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes. """

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i’ll take a stab: the enormously rich people rushing to build AI and replace everyone’s job will get richer, while everyone else suffers. that’s why.

Right, yeah.. That's the subtext right?

Zuckerberg: "I don't understand why people would build something harmful to society just for money"

Interviewer: "What if they pretended to have noble motivations in order to disguise their greed from both themselves and everyone else?"

Zuckerberg: "Damn, good point"

The Commander will then usher us all into Gilead.

Broken clock is right twice a day.

And in this case I think is quite correct

Unless it is a digital clock stuck on some time. Then only once.

What?

Most of the world uses 24-hour clock as default in digital clocks.

Digital clocks usually show am/pm, whereas analog clocks don't, so a frozen digital clock is only right once a day

Am I the only one getting the impression this dude was merely lucky back in the day, in fact at the right time, rather than having been super intelligent nor forward thinking… ?

I mean - given all his throw outs in media and his apparent burn of nearly 80bn for a failed 3D world?

I mean, of course it was a matter of being at the right place and right time, and being able to execute. He definitely was lucky but that alone isn't enough

Greed was needed next to luck.

Disclaimer- ex Meta employee.

Horizon was horribly managed, but also we threw all of our unannounced projects under that umbrella to make it look better for shareholders when we finally cut it. The original LLM research, smart glasses, and a bunch of other projects were under the "Reality Labs" business expense.

what amount, if we agree some nice research came out of these labs, we can attribute to Zuck directly impacting the process in a positive way...?

I'm trying to counter my thesis here really, but let's allow myself to be wrong about a person.

> I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future.

He does not understand his own motivations? Like he doesn't want to automate away his entire very expensive workforce and bunker/yacht service staff with robots. There is a pretty clear endgame here.

This is actually pretty good.

All dictators and Fascists in the history believe they are benevolent and doing best for the society/World. Fascism seems to be the dominant ideology among SV billionaires today. They want more control, not because they need more money, but because they want to do “good” to everyone in the world. They genuinely believe they can dominate the world using AI. They are playing the World domination game. They act and talk like the commanders of the armies and rulers of the nations. They are after the absolute power so nothing less is enough for them.

I doubt Larry Elison thinks he is doing good in the world. Same for everyone else. Maybe the exceptions are Elon and Bill.

sometimes can't believe such rich/mighty people are this stupid

Now go read Zuck’s comments on AI when he fired 8000 employees earlier this year.

Any particular quote you want to share?

It is one page of text. I think you can manage to read it and come to your own conclusions without relying on clickbait headlines and out of context quotes. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/technology/meta-layoffs.h...

You clearly have an opinion you want to share, otherwise you wouldn't have written anything. Instead of just outright saying what you think, you are being vague. Why? It's true that Meta laid off a lot of people, and blamed refocusing on AI as the reason, but I still don't see how that somehow contradicts GP's quote above.

one time about 9 years ago I was in the comments of a stackoverflow question, and saying something like "an accessor function need not directly give the underlying structure of the data it's accessing, for example, just because in common lisp, (car nil) is nil and (cdr nil) is also nil, does not mean that nil is implemented as (cons nil nil).

The person I was responding to (who I recall was disagreeing with me on the more general principle) said something to the effect of "well you're wrong, in common lisp that's indeed how nil is implemented".

I was skeptical and asked for proof of this claim, and they responded clearly angrily with the link to the SBCL repo and said something like "the source code is right there. You can just look it up yourself instead of being so rude. I'm no longer going to interact with you and will delete these comments in 10 minutes."

I think I looked through the source code for a few minutes, but wasn't able to find any evidence of nil being pair of itselves.

We really don’t celebrate enough how much AI has saved us from terrible SO interactions. Not being entirely serious here, because the site had its good parts, but arguing in threads or having your questions randomly eviscerated or threads closed was a hard way to learn programming.

Nope. Sorry. Negative. Paywall.

did he fire 8000 people because of AI, or because he over hired in ZIRP like everyone else?

Or mayhaps he overspent lately in the pursuit of AI that MIGHT replace workers, like everyone else.

I've been fired (super early in my career I was a waiter) and laid off twice (Great recession and the covid overspend). If you think for even a second that an organization will put you before profits you have wasted that one second.

Fascist calling out other fascists for being fascists. Pot meet kettle. Don’t look at me look at the real bad guys over there!

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