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Comment by sevenzero | Hacker News Reader

Tech specialists ignoring human feelings about AI and the future of tech, while also looking at the amount of downright evil tech out there makes reconsider about wanting to continue to work in this profession over and over again.

Before I knew how to program I used to think software developers were smart wizards capable of creating cool stuff out of thin air but the recent years proved me differently given how many of them outright water out of their mouths at the mere thought of replacing the human in the loop with some bullshit parrot we call AI.

Especially on this website I rarely find people having human first thoughts and it makes me despise software engineers.

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> "human first thoughts"

And what exactly do you define those as?

What are the examples of evil tech?

Autonomous flying drones, mass surveillance, AI trained to deny health insurance claims

The trouble with some of these techs is that its good or bad depending on use. Flying drones are great for disaster aid, delivery of items in difficult regions, mapping your farm, etc. Mass surveillance, yes, thats unpleasant, but its a bit hard to see how for instance we can't also have advances in camera technology and not incentivize it happening anyway due to people just installing cameras of their own accord. AI trained to deny insurance claims, well, I'd put that on using AI as an excuse to launder the insurer's own wishes.

And sometimes, the valid outcome is to deny a claim. It's not like fraud magically disappears in the world of health insurance.

Yes that too. Can't really say who is wrong in a denied claim without considering both sides. The one denied is naturally sour and wants to complain regardless of whether the reason was valid or not.

All the things that help societies function in a stable way. So please also add All Cops Are Bad and prisons are bad and so on.

Oceania would be quite a stable system, true.

Pretty much anything Microsoft does, for example.

The OS is neutral (I don't like forced ads and things like that, but that's just how they probably deem they can be profitable today. You can place that as a negative yes), the browser is neutral, well it was at least nice to have some competition before they caved to Chrome. The gaming systems are well liked generally. C# is well liked.

If you mean things like being overly agreeable to government requests or aiding Israel in Palestine, then I can agree.

I mean things like:

- Not listening to user feedback for years until people started leaving the OS, at which point they started "listening" to add back things like taskbar location changing, things that were present in previous Windows versions. Also seems like every update breaks stuff, they clearly don't care about testing the stuff they put out.

- Every keystroke or button you click on Windows sends telemetry to their ad partners. Probably same on all their other products, too

- Built-in ads on PAID products

- Spying on everything you do with things like Windows Copilot and Recall

- Filing patents to monitor your activities to show ads, black mirror style

- Force-feeding their own agenda to their users instead of listening what users want (look what they did to Github after buying it)

- Their own Edge browser is horrendous spyware. If you go and download Google Chrome, it will tell you with a popup that Edge is better and you shouldn't download Chrome. Not to mention that many screens of dark pattern popup you have to "yes|later" before you can even use the browser

And the list goes on. Honestly I don't know if they've done anything user-centric in recent memory at all. And if they have, it's usually only because the media has villainized them to the point where their PR team says they can no longer ignore it. They don't seem to ever proactively care about their users, only retroactively when abusing their users has crossed some public line.

Online gambling.

Big tech has provided me immense improvements in life. Governments are great at fumbling things at best, experts at killing millions at worst. How is tech worse than governments or other businesses? I am every day grateful to Google, Amazon, OpenAI etc for the wonderful services they provide for so cheap or free. The people who whine are precisely the problem people. Many shopkeepers used to be lazy, rude and think themselves kings. After amazon and home food delivery services, they have gotten whipped into shape. Many items were simply not available at all in one's city, and I can now easily have them at my doorstep.

Fishermen rejoice, for the price of bait will come down rapidly in the face of such a dramatic oversupply.

I am giving you honest feedback exactly how I feel my life improved from big tech. If you want to ignore me, then you are free to. "Big tech is evil/harmful" then can be made only if you agree to ignore and discriminate against people who are honestly believing otherwise. Thats okay if you want to feel so, nobody is stopping you. I am being completely honest in how I absolutely hated it before Amazon and how shops have improved in their behavior.

If this is your genuine belief then try this exercise: put yourself in the shoes of the shopkeeper who owned his own means of production directly and sold his wares to his immediate community before Big Tech. Would you rather have his job, or would you prefer to be working in an Amazon warehouse where you're obliged to relieve yourself in a bottle for want of toilets while being surveilled in a manner a Soviet political officer might consider excessive?

I'd rather not be an asshole shopkeeper. If I were, I'd try to be a punctual and good shopkeeper. But without market pressure why would I want to be? Maybe working conditions in Amazon warehouses are not so nice, but even if they slowed it down a bit, I'd still buy from them because my city doesn't have a given item. Pissing in bottles is what it is, if you think you can make a better business than Amazon than you can try to attract those workers.

From the buyer end, you do see the problem right? You can have a slower and more expensive business, how many buyers would want that? That in itself is a luxury only people with sufficient money can afford.

I am not opposed to welfare schemes which would therefore incentivize amazon to pay more than that or improve working conditions.

I am glad it has, and I think that recognizing the affordable access to welfare, goods, and food has been a valuable gain.

Call me a problem person, but I would say the tech companies you are referring too are perpetrating significant harm, but maybe you do not directly experience this. As an exercise I can use terms that we normally restrict to governments.

Google controls arguably the worlds most advancement propaganda system^1 ever created, has monopolistic control over information access worldwide^2, has farreaching influence on academic research^3456 and can perform censorship on major communication and education sites without overshight or juridicial control^7. They are a dictatorship with liberal capitalism as their ideology.

A world controlled by these businesses may have been beneficial for you so far, but they systematically disempower us. By yielding power and influence to them, we lose the ability to decide how we wish live and how we shape the systems around us.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... [3] https://focs.computer.org/2025/ [4] https://neurips.cc/sponsors/sponsors-list?year=2026 [5] https://www.usenix.org/supporters [6] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c..., 02 Oct 2025 Full accounts report Google providing £1.325 billion for Deepmind activities [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#Advertise...

I get the arguments like Google has more money than many countries GDP's and that they are one of the most used services on the internet. But I think unlike governments, they won it fair and square, not by forcibly imposing it on the populace with guns like governments do but by people naturally liking their services. I do like liberal capitalism and I think its one of the best systems of government, but I completely get the point about needing more diversification. I would argue it is also good for Google itself that alternatives exist. Otherwise Google itself might get stuck in an unrecoverable rut.

But at least I would thank you that you considered the benefits I felt, the other responses were just downright discriminatory and refusing to see someone could honestly feel their life improved by big tech.

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