Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It's Almost Hard to Believe
futurism.com
futurism.com
AI isn’t a new iPhone moment, it’s a fire moment. Dario Amodei didn’t bring it into existence, physics did — we’re just slowly working out the cognitive science for the first time after Crysis machines ended up being really good at something that our type of intelligence relies on (intuitive framing via huge neural networks — see The Frame Problem).
Also this doesn’t really matter in anthropic’s case, but FWIW: we should try to blame CEOs a bit less, and shareholders (capitalists) a lot more. Our system isn’t named ‘officerism’, after all!
So kind also of Physics himself to have gone to such trouble, to have invented all these brilliant GPUs in the first place, synthesized trillions of dollars to build the data centers to hold them, and burned the midnight electrons mining all that coal and natural gas to fuel the power plants it built too.
All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds in which inevitability steers our destiny. You know, I've really been considering getting a lobotomy myself. I guess it's a pretty grand idea that thinking is now categorically outmoded. But then again I might really should have done it when they were cheaper in 2010, because Physics had it all under control anyway!
The fundamental delusion of this take is why we are suffering this lunacy. When the crash happens after the circular ponzi scheme hanging all its risk on the public breaks apart the hatred for these lunatics will be justified.
But then I guess the lunatics would simply claim that they didn't have enough situational awareness as they run away with our tax money after the bailout.
When the crash happens after the circular ponzi scheme hanging all its risk on the public breaks apart
These people are so disconnected from reality.
You can do business without workers, investors, shareholders. You can't do business without consumers.
why would businesses need everybody to participate when a specific portion of people are enough?
> why would businesses need everybody to participate when a specific portion of people are enough?
For business nothing is ever enough. It creates products and customers for them out of thin air. The only required thing is money in the consumer pocket. Business itself is going to pressure governments to give more people more money, by whatever means necessary, so it can scoop it up off of them.
What even some millionaires now realize is that it's very hard to take the money away from other millionaires. They don't spend that much. But if you tax them and give the money to consumers, suddenly, as a rich person, you have clear path to taking this money for yourself, just by having a successful customer facing business.
That (among other things) is why some rich advocate for higher taxation of the rich.
If everyone around you is poor it's very hard to get any richer yourself, regardless of how much you already have. And rich people like getting richer most of all.
Spot on. So that's the main point that needs to be addressed. Or rather expanded upon. Because already a ton of people get awarded purchasing power without doing any useful economic activity.
And it's gonna be expanded because without purchasing power we can't play the game called business. And people like business, because it makes some of them richer and richer.
I’m not saying Anthropic and OpenAI are going to be the ones to deliver it - but…you really don’t see the ubiquitous need for these?
Blinding need. We don’t have time for each other like we used to.
If even one of those assumptions is no longer true, nothing works. And when I mean nothing, I mean nothing. Money doesn’t work, rent doesn’t work, debt doesn’t work, labor doesn’t work, production doesn’t work. It would have to be a quick de-industrialization unless we have a plan. No more monkey-patching with social programs, this is an entire paradigm shift.
if there’s less work to be done for everyone to have what they need, that would be considered a benefit by governed society, and universal basic income will likely be rolled out.
Not necessarily. It's not going to be evenly distributed. It's not like today, but everyone works 4 hours a week. Some dudes will work 80, others won't work at all. That situation is what's most adventitious to shareholders.
> and universal basic income will likely be rolled out.
If UBI even happens, it's going to enable a poverty-level existence.
Thing of all the things you enjoy doing, that you wouldn't be able to afford if you were in poverty. That's UBI life.
Why? Remember all the work that's being done now would still be being done by robots. There should be more surpluses not less.
literally the ones related to this very site
That’s the shortest I can make it.
Pandemic workplace closures exposed a lot of that.
The implicit deal is that they can keep extracting the value from us as long as they keep tossing us enough scraps.
They show every intention of claiming a bigger piece of the pie in return for basically nothing, and that kind of shit will lead to an unstable system eventually.
Even with AGI robots smarter than us I think there's a good chance it would go like the Antebellum South with robots replacing the slaves and humans planning their debutantes balls.
None of those technological shifts affected so many of the jobs at once, nor did they simultaneously threaten many of the alternative jobs for those affected.
> Even with AGI robots smarter than us I think there's a good chance it would go like the Antebellum South with robots replacing the slaves and humans planning their debutantes balls.
Ok. So you have a small number of planters with big estates, what happens to all the other people (e.g. the "slaves" and other worksers, after the planters no longer need them)?
Wealth is not distributed evenly enough for such a fantasy. Dario Amodei and Sam Altman will be able to go play planter. Me? Not so much.
> in all the land, two-thirds will be cut off and perish, but one-third will be left alive
e.g. game reviewer ssethtzentach added it to his most recent video, etc.
the messaging is following a similar trend as qanon, you can tell there is a broad effort to get this trickling into popular consciousness, though it's hard to tell if this is to get people to accept it or fight it
It's an apt metaphor, but probably not in the way parent intended it. History says there will certainly be hoarders of wealth... and then everyone else.
It’s not purely that people shift to other jobs, it’s what jobs and where. A union manufacturing job and retail cashier job at dollar tree are not equivalent. And when the whole core of a company moves they aren’t replaced.
The real number is work force participation. It’s down. Alot. Economic share of wages is down. Alot.
1. As you say, new jobs of what sort, with what labor power, and at what pay?
Offshoring manufacturing was as much about breaking US labor unions as anything else. No unions in China, and no bad press about feuding with US workers. Just 'oops, new economic reality, things change, so sorry'.
Making high value add jobs disappear and replacing them with only low value add jobs isn't a net gain.
2. What mechanism do people see realistically distributing hypothetical bountiful gains from AI-boosted productivity?
Let's imagine AI works out perfectly: productivity gains through the roof, entire industries automated, record corporate profits across the board.
What plausible path do people see from that (and the unemployment it spiked) to most people being given a chunk of the profits?
Remember: they're already legally spoken for by the shareholders.
Introducing new corporate tax rates at the federal level? Ha!
And even if UBI manages the get through in some form... how much do you think that will be?
Which is to say, how much of their wealth do you think the richest will be willing to part with to redistribute?
Because history says as little as they can get away with.
The only thing I would say is that shareholders don’t have an exclusive legal right to profit. That is a policy choice and one that has shifted over time (American law has moved to the extreme shareholder maximizing end of the spectrum) and is currently different in other countries (Germany has a corporate governance structure that Requires an employee and union board of directors so it isn’t just shareholders interests that are represented in governance decisions.
The paying/selling part will be transitory. Right now the people paying for it are investors, and they're selling a cost-cutting dream to executive managers.
If someone builds a machine that automated all the jobs, they've have amassed an unprecedented amount of power, even if the economy is in ruins for everyone else. They won't need to sell anything to anyone.
> What stops the rest of humanity from turning data centers into a pile of ash?
AI slaughterbots. Think the Ukraine front line, but completely automated.
A mix of other people who will defend them because it’s a way better and more stable economic deal than joining the starving masses and probably autonomous weapons systems that can kill large amounts of people quickly over a large area.
We have to stop fearing the machines and start fearing the firmware running on our brains! It's capitalism that's the problem, not the robots... if anything the robots can liberate us from capital's death grip!
The Chinese models are able to distill outputs into a model of slightly worse performance within a few weeks of each release, and the same copyright exemptions which protect these guys scraping also protect China.
As long as their lobbyists don't win (and the deck is stacked against them, make no mistake) the future of AI is not going to be owned by the frontier labs.
We can literally take it from them. I get why people don't like to think about that sort of thing, but... yeah. We could make AI a sort of public good and do something like the Permanent Fund Dividend or something. There's lots of options even in the "reformist" way of thinking about it. But we shouldn't be naive.
a ding to the social credit score but not enough for a drone or ICE team to be dispatched to your address. but that might change.
(Also... LOL.)
The binary thinking in this thread and the lack of creativity is just... astounding to me.
Jobs will become even more scarce, so how does that follow?
>robots can liberate us from capital's death grip
We are already live in a world sufficiently technologically advanced to feed and house everyone, and yet we don't.
(Or maybe I'm just projecting.)
say what you will about uber but it is a seamless service. there are a lot of great apps out there.
now tech isn't making things better it's rapidly converting to aggressive rent seeking, and everyone can see it.
only a rube thinks Big Tech is going to make tomorrow better for everyone.
It's hard to see why basically anyone would at this point.
edit: There are solutions to this. See link.
Uber made the taxi experience way worse and less predictable.
Now, I can’t just walk out of a bar, get into a clean taxi and go home, I have to fiddle with an app, wait, wave trying to identify “my” ride, then hope it’s clean and safe. It’s a nightmare compared to what we had before.
Uber eats made food delivery significantly worse and more expensive.
It used to be that I could get food delivered for a known fixed price, it would arrive while still hot and it would be delivered to the door. Now, the price is obfuscated, there’s an extra fee for getting the food warm, sometimes the drinks are spilled into the bag, delivery is to the curb so I have to go outside to get it.
There’s a lot more that has been made worse by tech companies.
Are you old enough to remember the bad old days?
Again the overwhelming majority of my taxi rides were fine. The overwhelming majority of my Uber rides are also fine. But when things go wrong they definitely went wrong worse with taxis than Uber rides for me.
I should also mention we tried to use their version of Uber (DiDi), but I suspect there was some kind of price-fixing attempt there because no taxis would come for the price that they suggested. We had the option of upping our price until someone came and then I gave up on the service.
My other experiences were some years back in upstate New York, where there were also questionable practices, and you really had to look over the driver’s shoulder. They tried to control scams with payments based on zones, and the drivers would bend the rules when possible.
I'm old enough to remember them. I very much preferred the "bad old days" over bad new days of ride-sharing services.
And at best you could get pizza delivered. Now everything can be delivered. Just because sometimes the drivers mess up doesn't mean overall it's worse.
Neither of your examples are good ones for your point.
You can still hail cabs off the street, it’s just that it’s an inefficient way of getting a ride.
Using uber I will immediately see the price up front and I can tailor the cab to my needs and price.
Also, Uber Eats delivers food that used to be pretty much non-deliverable. There's no comparison, it's a pure net-additive capability. You just couldn't get a lot of foods without physically going there and now you can.
Why can't anyone see beyond their job?
Maybe you can't see that, but for a good many people hovering about the knife edge of just getting by such things are a pressing concern.
Perhaps in future Halcyon days when all needs are met joy will be had by all .. right now there's a looming gap of uncertainty for many.
Like, I lost literally everything when I got sick. I think I probably understand "hovering about the knife edge" better than most people on this site. I lost my career, my sense of identity, and more than most can imagine. When you have faced explaining to your son how you might not make it through treatment and how he'll be responsible for a lot of things I am responsible for going forward, you kind of look at these people whining about AI codegen and sigh. This freaking technological miracle that might make their jobs obsolete so they're afraid of it, those people are as children who cannot see that it could literally free them from stupid bullshit... You people are not your jobs, you're not your salary and your job at ServiceNow or SalesForce or whatever can never love you back. The robot isn't a threat to you, the system that values the robot more than you is. It's basic root cause analysis.
But I bounced back. I fought through it. I kept on slogging through the stress and catastrophe. This whole thing feels like the meme to me, "oh, fist time?"
You know what I learned though? That we are not always powerless to act. We can get up and go. We can create! We can just do stuff. People need to realize that they have agency! Your life can get better if you get to continue it (hopefully). You are allowed to live how you want to live, you can do things! You don't have to accept being fed dog shit every day. How many of these people bitching and moaning about AI have even thought to try to form a union? How many of these people vote? How many of these people get off their assess and go and participate in some direct action? How many?
Dammit, why don't I see anyone in the street protesting the war? Why don't I see anyone protesting the lack of social safety nets? Why don't I see anyone doing anything. You know why? Because doing things is hard. Because most people want things to change without putting in any of the work (sometimes dangerous, sometimes stressful) to change things. And meanwhile, I see AI - which could literally be a tool we use to fix the injustices of the world, the disaster of tying people's right to exist to their pay check - that NONSENSE that we mostly all hate, and the response is "oh my god what if it takes my job?" or so-called "leftists" bending over backwards to defend copyright law.
These people complaining don't want the system to change, they just want to maintain a privileged position within it. But if the system has always been harming people at the margins, is it ok if we go back? "Oh, thank goodness we made AI illegal so I can still have to fill out my manual TPS reports and report to Bob on my progress for the week! How great is that!" The lack of imagination of a better world is astounding and disheartening. The whiners and perpetual malcontents shouting about AI secretly want to be the billionaire, not overthrow a system that allows them in the first place. They want their previously privileged status as a "knowledge worker" to remain special.
Man, am I the only one in here who read Marx? Bell Hooks? Kropotkin? Dream bigger people!
>dreams of man made famine and desolation
Do you happen to wear glasses, mister Ciego? Me and my marx reading boys have some bourgeois liquidation quotas to fill.
I’m not a Marxist, but jeepers, it should be required reading of people.
Your - piloto_ciego - needs will never be met by the abundance of the planet. Perhaps your great great great grandchildren may begin to live in such a free way, but you and everyone else alive now will not. There are too many people on the planet, wealth is too unevenly distributed, food production is too unevenly distributed, water is too unevenly distributed, energy production is too unevenly distributed; the only way anyone can get their needs met is by participating in an economy which can allocate and relocate those scarce resources.
All AI is doing is taking an increasingly large share of those resources in pursuit of ensuring the survival of an ouroboros of circular funding between a tiny number of companies to the detriment of everyone else attempting to participate in that economy.
AI may or may not prove to be a significant step on the ladder to the ultimate end of scarcity, but there is no possible way that anyone you could conceivably meet, much less be, will ever experience the kind of life liberated from toil that you wish for.
Electricity promised to eliminate toil and bring us a life of leisure. It did not. Perhaps all technologies have this potential, AI included. That potential will never be realized because relentless and perpetual growth is a necessary precondition and justification for the development and expansion of such technologies, and that growth demands and consumes whatever excess human capacity that the technology freed up.
The best you can hope for is to exploit the technology selfishly, carving out a life of scholarly pursuit and passion projects while rent-seeking on top of the economic work of humans who couldn't get there as fast as you. But that has been an option since the invention of money.
> Electricity promised to eliminate toil and bring us a life of leisure. It did not. Perhaps all technologies have this potential, AI included. That potential will never be realized because relentless and perpetual growth is a necessary precondition and justification for the development and expansion of such technologies, and that growth demands and consumes whatever excess human capacity that the technology freed up.
Also, this speaks to me as someone who has never used used a screw driver to turn a screw into a board. The drill driver has made it amazingly better.
EDIT to add:
Also, I've lived a subsistence lifestyle before, I'm fairly close to doing it again though I'll still need some money to roll through the household? Dream bigger buddy. It's not all doom and gloom.
Such games may involve property taxes, eminent domain, or similar.
You are inadvertently proving my point. Yes an impact driver makes it easier to get a screw into a board, but a carpenter still works a full day. Technology's reducing effect on labor effort is always used to increase output, never to decrease input.
> Dream bigger
I am awake.
Dream bigger. You're not awake, you're clinging to a fantasy where you get to be a special privileged member of society. That is done. We're not going back.
You can sit here moaning about how you used to be special and important, or you can start doing the hard work of building a society where not having a job doesn't put your very survival at risk.
> or you can start doing the hard work of building a society where not having a job doesn't put your very survival at risk.
Escaping to a forest cabin might well be hard work but it helps nobody other than yourself. You are escaping from society, not building a new one. Your comments about privilege are deeply misplaced.
Ironically, this oversimplification is narrow-minded.
Just because something is inevitable doesn't mean the people whose family's lives get fucked up along the way are somehow assholes or unrealistic for demanding that we handle it in a more controlled/extended way that doesn't cause so much misery.
In my opinion, the moment tech perception flipped from "it's kind of cool" to "I don't trust it" was E. Snowden in 2013.
For more than one decade now, we have progressively switched to treating tech more like a cigarette addiction we should keep in check (even if we don't succeed) rather than the qualify of life improvement, communication & entertainment tool it could be.
And tech companies don't care anymore. We went from Google's "don't be evil" to CEO's clamoring they will maybe make us jobless, and potentially kill us all, with Uber & Amazon's run of the mill human exploitation in the middle for good measure.
Maybe that won’t happen, but these CEOs not only tell us it will happen, they have the gall to brag about it. Of course that’s unpopular.
“Yeah I plan to basically torture most of the world’s population until they eventually die. Except the elite few who hold the AI means of production. Wait, why are you booing?”
And these CEOs have very little to do with creating and improving said companies' products. The repeated outlandish claims kind of definitely broke this illusion.
Do you remember when the AI CEOs spoke at college graduations? They got flustered when they were booed, they literally didn't understand why they were being booed.
Those are some pretty smart people working on the bleeding edge of miracle world-changing technology. Despite being pretty smart, they're also confused and disoriented by the thing they're creating but have no choice but to push forward. They're pretty open and candid about their worries too. Unlike most people, I personally see them as trailblazers and pioneers, not as loathsome parasites.
The same people that drool over the possibility that they could rule the world via AI and robots?
They are constantly talking about how dangerous it is and how it needs some controls. This is not an easy problem to solve however and controls don't magically appear just because you want them.
The option of just not working on it is also off the table.
A lot of super smart people working full time on this problem still haven't figured it out. What do you want the CEOs to realistically do here?
> The same people that drool over the possibility that they could rule the world via AI and robots?
This is just your personal conjecture. I see no real evidence of this.
The kids are alright.
If I got this right Gini measures inequality in either income or spending but as Piketty showed we have crazy rising inequality in capital / wealth.
Who could have seen this coming?
https://old.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/1juptdx/adob...
If that doesn’t open (Reddit has become a walled garden):
https://archive.ph/20260817024427/https://www.reddit.com/r/B...
But it was never cool. Having money can fake being cool though, at least for a while.
Now the capitalists who control the technology are in bed with the government, it certainly is uncool. But in a totally different way than before.
And distrust is reasonable stance for most people. Goals of financial system don't most of time align with well being of everyone in the population.
And anyone who still says "oh, they'll find new jobs, Industrial Revolution, Luddites, etc." is clearly not thinking.
Half way through the video it clicked. The presenter said that it was because we have better tools to detect and decadent behavior and traits such as psychopathy early.
But I think that most of the psychopaths are now either politicians or CEOs. They can still kill without the fear of getting caught or dirtying the hands.
this seems to be the list:
65% Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
70% Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg
70% Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
70% OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
70% SpaceX CEO Elon Musk
75% Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai
75% Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei
79% Palantir Chairman Peter Thiel
81% Palantir CEO Alex Karp> Palantir’s extremely controversial CEO Alex Karp scored the lowest, with 81 percent choosing “don’t trust,” while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella fared the best — albeit with a pitiful 35 percent “trust” score.
I hope my prediction is wrong.
I've watched journalists dunk on this tech since the days of Tacotron. They love to dish out hate and venom and crystalize it around concepts that are easy to sell.
Not that the Dario and Sam haven't both been deliberately hyperbolic and made themselves easy targets, but the media was always attempting to do this.
Journalists hate AI and they always have.
We've seen them try dozens, if not hundreds of things to get the story to stick. Lately it's data centers being built and the stories of neighbors complaining about noise.
As much as I blame Sam for getting people angry at him, journalists also contributed to radicalizing people against him and turning him into an assassination target.
This headline is literally trying to reinforce this.
Wonder why people can't stand them.
Also, even if people DO know AI CEOs are lying... why would that make them likable? Liars are unlikable, almost as a rule. Of course people don't like and trust them.
So either AI CEOs genuinely believe the "permanent underclass" stuff, in which case you should hate them because obviously. Or they don't believe it, in which case you should hate them because they're liars. Either way they lose. The only way to win is to not say batshit insane stuff that implies everyday people will die en-masse. Which... yeah. I feel like anyone could've told them that.
More people alive today are educated in computer science than ever before. The same is true of epistemology, linguistics, and broader philosophy. Many have also lived long enough to see previous waves of AI come and go.
People were already watching the topic closely over a decade ago with DeepMind, AlphaGo, etc. None of the arguments against the current AI methods are new. People were poking holes in statistical methods centuries ago.
Mainstream media just waits for the right time to pounce and attempt to sway everyone else who is uncertain or out of the loop. They actually started out with a pro-AI stance. That in no way implies the majority was ever out of the loop or believed in any of the hype. The public are not a flock of baby birds waiting for their empty minds to be fed.
The majority doesn't even care about the principle of the matter. They are far more interested in whether it actually works reliably. The appeals to emotion, political bias, or ego are wildly out of touch and outdated. What you're observing today with young people is not that they have different "opinions", but that they are burned out on all opinions. We forced them to become so much more sophisticated and discerning by pressing that button too many times. You'd be just as cynical if you spent your childhood watching an iPad deliver endless ragebait.
Oh AI will take our jobs..? LET IT!!
Who wants to work all your life and still not be able to afford a house?
Instead of asking to be wage slaves your entire lives, demand your politicians to give you UBI.
Except people still need to eat and.pay for a roof over their heaf
>Who wants to work all your life and still not be able to afford a house?
That is the fear they have from ai
>Instead of asking to be wage slaves your entire lives, demand your politicians to give you UBI.
Except the same people leading these companies do everytjing thaey can to avoid paying taxes that could fund ubi.
Elons whole Doge fiasco, the google guys fighting wealth taxes in california all fights against helping the people they are displacing. The tech ceos talk a good game about an ai powered life of luxury and ease but its not for you and me its for them and fuck the proles.
Unless there is a mechanism to convert the extra revenue from machines back to humans, the money just filters to the top 1% of the 1%. Unfortunately, that has effectively never been the case in history. Job displacement is the real late stage capitalism.
For the past few decades people have been told over and over: no more factory? no problem! that was backbreaking work better done by robots anyway. go to college, study really hard, get a degree and you'll get a better paying job that leverages your cognitive skills. Remember all those "I was a metalworker and transitioned to web developer" stories?
And now, all of a sudden they're being told, "oops, those jobs that leveraged your cognitive skills are going away too now" (and not because we're saving humanity or some noble reason, but so rich tech companies and their share holders can get richer), and "no, we have no idea what, if any, new jobs will emerge for you".