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Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

The tone of the marketing video is a bit irritating to me as someone who has been laid off and feels cheated and fearful of AI.

It shows people who seem to have very full and rich lives, and the reason they do is because they use ChatGPT. These are the people smart enough to say things like "do what needs to be done", or "change the background to make it look better"--insights like these are why they make the big bucks.

On the one hand, I think this is an accurate depiction of the future. There is no meritocracy here. Some people have access to the best AIs and can speak a sentence and get great results, and the rest of us don't have access and so we're the poors. The happy presentation doesn't match the way I'm feeling.

I do wonder how rich CEOs will justify earning 500x as much as their employees when they're just another person that's dumber than an AI. Why are they paid so much again?

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They're paid so much either because they're the company founders, and so they kept a part of the value of the whole company they created. Seems fair.

Or because being a (well known) CEO is a terminal career position. It's a bit like being a top sports star. The wages are high because once they're out, they're out for good. Whatever they earned needs to last them a long time. Screwing up in the CEO position is, when boards are doing their jobs at least, pretty much the end of the road for them because nobody wants to hire an ex-CEO into a middle management or IC position.

Random example: Marissa Mayer. She did well at Google, but once she became CEO of Yahoo! and failed her career was effectively over. Since then her career history is: did a startup with a friend that produced an iPhone app for cleaning your contact lists, and later a photo sharing app. I guess she's nice and pleasant enough, so she also did the usual post-CEO thing of sitting on a few boards, NGO work and investing. It's not a bad life. But in terms of actually running things that matter again - no.

Lots of cases like that.

Who wants to sign up for a job that's high pressure, high hours, and will probably the last real job you'll ever have, and one where your success is often entirely out of your hands? Not that many. So the pay has to be good.

Marissa Mayer has plenty of career options if she's willing to work for only 3 or 4x the median wage.

You'd think so but I don't believe that's the case. They're viewed as "overqualified".

Because they earned it with their strong entrepreneurial spirit and grit.

Haven’t you learned anything?

If they adopt a different tone (like Anthropic has been doing), it will get called fear marketing.

> On the one hand, I think this is an accurate depiction of the future. There is no meritocracy here. Some people have access to the best AIs and can speak a sentence and get great results, and the rest of us don't have access and so we're the poors. The happy presentation doesn't match the way I'm feeling.

It will probably still have some veneers of meritocracy.

These will be very well-credentialed people, who went to top schools and will know all the right people, to whom they can tell all the right words, and it's not access to AI that will be the determining factor, but the fact that they're entrusted with capital and authority to direct small teams of people who also went to top schools and can speak corporate jargon at a bot.

It will just exacerbate dynamics that are already there. Why do people need bachelor's degrees to send emails, today? For the same reason someone will need a PhD or a master's degree from a prestigious school to do it tomorrow.

And the rest, well, you know, some of the remaining journalists will write op-eds describing how they are beyond help, too angry, too dirty, too much of an other.

People spent thousands of year justifying different standards of living on the ground of "having cleverly chosen their parents".

And everyone _got along with it_.

And in a sense, we're still doing just that (ask the other 2/3th of the world to explain why your standards of living are above theirs.)

The world is changing. Wont help if you keep stuck in the old world.

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