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Comment by jmalicki | Hacker News Reader

Uber and Airbnb both had similar risks in their S1s, for obvious reasons.

I was thinking maybe Uber but I was not sure it could have been that bad. They would have had states pushing back but against a very popular product with users.

But Airbnb, good point: they would have talked about the risks of states curtailing their businesses.

It’s still a very unusual level of hatred, I would say.

Uber called out that they were aggressively doing an end run around both taxi licensing AND minimum wage laws and facing significant pushback on both fronts, among many other risks.

I think there’s a genuinely huge divisive opinion on AI companies. We don’t see this due to our particular industry echo chambers but really the majority of society has bigger problems and this offers them no solutions and threatens to take their lifelines away.

Divisive technology leads to hate. Flock as well which is an us and them. Same mindset.

We are not as popular as we think we are. I know which side of the fence I want to be on.

Well said.

The divisiveness is not inherent in the technology. Other forces are driving divisiveness around issues: AI seems to simply be caught up in that trend.

I say "AI IS OK!"

Well it’s a little more complicated than that. It doesn’t just manifest itself. People create it. And people do that for a reason. So there is intent. And that means it’s not naturally inert and consequence free and “ok” in a social construct.

AI is pretty universally hated, it might be the one thing that large swaths of society have unity about! It's right up there with thinking babies and puppies are cute.

I am willing to concede that AI has a negative reputation, but what I'm saying is that it shouldn't.

AI is a neutral technology.

The telephone (whose automation caused massive layoffs of telephone operators btw) can be used to order a pizza, talk to your mom, or facilitate drug trafficking and organized crime.

No one complains about telephones. It's a utility. AI also is a utility.

I think phones were similarly hated, but diluted over a ~15 year period as they were gradually introduced to society. AI is happening much faster, practically all at once.

And I think the extent of the hatred in part is also due to how widespread it is, not just how fast it's spread. It's everywhere. If you watch YouTube, you're hearing people narrating scripts read by AI. Social media posts are written with AI. Students are cheating with AI. AI is threatening to take jobs from knowledge workers. AI is copying the work of artists and creators. Etc. There's almost nothing it doesn't touch.

(I'm not talking here about why it's hated or whether it should be hated. More just commenting on the remarkability of how widely it's disliked.)

Its not just pervasiveness, but how it's characterized. "AI data centers are raising electricity rates." or "AI pivot is the reason for 10% layoffs". It's rare that you read "AI cures cancer" or "AI reducing inflation" or "AI raising standard of living for blue collar workers".

The relentless drum beat on AI news is negative even when there is zero - literally zero - evidence around the speculation. To wit: AI will destroy all of humanity, or the related "AI will become sentient and lead to threat to human civ" etc. This is pure negative science fiction (related to Musk's AI will create a utopia in which everything will be free).

> To wit: AI will destroy all of humanity, or the related "AI will become sentient and lead to threat to human civ" etc. This is pure negative science fiction

All of this is true, but it is the two main AI companies themselves who created and marketed this narrative.

It's their negative science fiction. It is part of the marketing campaign they are running that is the foundation of arguments that the government should be their funding backstop (OpenAI have made this explicit), that open weights AI is more dangerous, that China is a threat, that only they can solve the problems they themselves are creating.

(After all, if China can only do what they are doing by distilling American models, which is what they claim, then the big American AI labs could shut down the risk for decades by downing tools out of principle.)

This whole fear scenario is more or less the entire basis for Anthropic's original elevator pitch, after all: that AI is dangerous and that they will specialise in making it safe.

Churlish to blame the media for accurately reporting what Musk, Amodei and Altman have said and the sort of blasé, detached, sociopathic way they say it.

And both have been damaging to society. And are getting fined and chased out of certain countries.

Why would you throw investment in this unless you’re just leveraging the growth in the time it takes for regulatory issues to appear? Which is terribly unethical.

Wall to wall bastards. I’d rather die poor than contribute to the further decline of society.

They have but this reply was a fully fair answer to my point; perhaps there are more.

Maybe those who seek and profit from the decline in our society also want to promote divisiveness?

Maybe divisiveness itself, is part of the problem?

Yep. We’re tribal apes. This is just a foot on the accelerator.

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