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Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of
by Silagi 4mo ago
Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.
You dont get to benefit from the expansion of companies like Uber, airbnb or meta, then pretend like you were always focused on the success of the average person. You didn't care when you could get ahead, don't pretend like you care now. It's childishly performative. This is an evolution of the same automation and communication tech that has been growing for as long as most people have been alive. Just now it might actually affect the technologically literate class. You did this. Own it.
- macintux 4mo agoSome of us have loathed Uber, Airbnb & Meta. Are we allowed to be negative about AI?
- enraged_camel 4mo agoIt's not a matter of being "allowed" per se. What the parent is saying that people need to do a better job being internally consistent in their beliefs and moral stances. If you are one such person, great! But my impression is that most people aren't.
- kentm 4mo agoSure. I think that I’d you were expressing concerns about all the leopards running around and having discussions about whether we need to do something about the leopard population, it’s perfectly reasonable to be upset when a leopard eats your face. It’s just that the median tech worker was more often to talk about moving fast and breaking things and making glib statements about buggy whips. If you were the sort of person to just shrug and say that a few leopards were the price of advancement then you’re probably not going to get a lot of sympathy. That is, unless you connect your current faceless state to your previous stance on leopards and admit that maybe you were shortsighted (generic “you” here, not you specifically).
- CurtMonash 4mo agoPartially correct. But the massive investments of capital, environmental resources, etc. are in some cases specific to modern AI, and some of the objections are specific to those. Ditto the overlapping issue of global intellectual property appropriation. (Much of what LLMs do is refactor what people posted on the web for free.)
- cm2012 4mo agoIt is the exact same capital that paid all of our salaries for the last 20 years
- 4ashgt 4mo agoMost people don't work for Uber, Meta or AirBnB and these companies have been criticized forever in tech forums. This time the "innovation" is also based on actual theft.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- danielovichdk 4mo ago[flagged]
- dmpk2k 4mo agoIt's weird for physicists to complain about nuclear weapons. They did it. Own it.
- Silagi 4mo agoMost do, in my experience? I worked at Argonne for a while, and they absolutely treated their profession with deadly seriousness. I didn't meet anyone who took the stance of "Move fast and break things". Most spent too many late nights rechecking their work to make sure it was correct. Even when being wrong would be entirely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. I get what you're saying, that not everyone who is in tech contributed, which is fair to an extent, see my other comments.
- toasty228 4mo agoWho's "they", the vast majority devs work for non tech companies doing very boring shit. We're not all hellbent on making the most $$$ while burning the world down like the silicon valley degenerates
- binary132 4mo agoPeople are never ever ever allowed to realize maybe sometimes bad things are bad once the chickens come home to roost. An antisocial belief they held fifteen years ago needs to define them forever, because people are just machines for receiving guilt and wrath, they can’t learn anything from suffering personally, or if they can here’s why it’s bad anyway. Also engineers building stuff to spec are exactly the same thing as venture capitalists
- kentm 4mo agoI don’t think they’re trying to imply that at all. But arguing that it’s bad without a mea culpa comes across as inauthentic.
- Silagi 4mo agoMore specifically, someone actively building on top of Amazon decrying the exploitation of workers and the environment is demonstrably hypocritical. And "engineers building things to spec" are not the same as those giving the orders, but they should take a measure of responsibility for the things they build. I think most people generally agree about the culpability of those following orders when people are harmed. I'm not even saying they should necessarily be held accountable; just that moralizing about it is hypocritical.
- tedmiston 4mo ago"Anyone who uses < public cloud computing > is hypocritical" is a pretty insane take, even for HN. All technologies have benefits and costs — choosing and using a technology does not imply the nonexistence of tradeoffs. One can give sufficient consideration to the downsides, and then determine that the upsides outweigh them. It's not rocket science.
- Silagi 4mo agoSure, but those people who "considered the downsides" shouldn't then moralize about the exploitation of workers; they're contributing to it. It's explicitly hypocritical. They're explicitly deciding the exploitation is worth the upsides for their or their company's benefit. I'm not excluding myself from this. Just chafing against this grandstanding by people actively contributing to the same problems, and especially annoyed by the people saying we should pause development because it's going to affect people's jobs. This isn't new. Edit: I'd also like to point out that "Public cloud computing" doesn't really capture what I said; the OP of the article is specifically building on Amazon, which has a well documented history of worker exploitation. Even building on Azure or Google cloud would be more defensible in the context of the article they wrote.
- dd8601fn 4mo agoThere are about ten billion relevant and reasonable ways to differentiate and choose priorities in all of that. Suggesting that nobody is entitled to opinions on one category sounds kinda silly.
- wiseowise 4mo ago> Suggesting that nobody is entitled to opinions on one category sounds kinda silly. How else would they feel morally superior to degenerate techies who finally got what they deserve? Didn't you get the memo? It's all Joe the Java developer who's the impetus of injustice in the world.
- Silagi 4mo agoI'm specifically saying "I'm entitled to displace people with automation built on previous work, but automation that affects me shouldn't be allowed" is a particularly hypocritical take. The implications of AI aren't as novel as tech circles would like to believe. The same trends in employment and automation have been happening across industries for decades in slightly different forms. This is just the first time it might actually affect the people doing the work, instead of being conveniently separated from their inner circle.
- kentm 4mo agoI very much agree with this position. And it didn’t even have to be AI. It’s possible that sufficiently advanced “dumb” compilers and tooling could lower demand. Or that the supply of developers outstripped demand - that’s happened in other professions. We always joked about how we’re automating our own jobs. We just happened to live in a period of explosive demand growth for our skill set so it never mattered for us. But it was never guaranteed that growth would continue in perpetuity. When mentoring a freshly minted dev, I always checked whether or not they were open to career and financial advice. And if they were, I would always make this point to them and tell them to think carefully how much of their massive tech salary they should be spending. I make it a point to keep abreast of what median salaries are for other job roles are viable and moderate my spending and saving accordingly, because there was always a possibility that the gravy train would stop.
- nocman 4mo ago> It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic. That's an awfully wide swath you are cutting there. I can't think of a single tech person that I've worked closely with in the last 20 years that I would describe as "riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale". The majority of tech workers do not work for FAANG, or anything close to it.
- Silagi 4mo agoAnd you're cutting an awfully wide swath in the opposite direction; most tech gains value by exploiting or displacing people. Economies of scale don't just exist at the absolute top of the economy. The computer cut out entire classes of people from jobs they had specialized in by decreasing the education or effort required to successfully complete tasks, at the cost of massively increased infrastructure costs. I'm all for pushing back against what AI might do, but doing it in this massively dishonest way just opens the door to obvious counters.
- bethekidyouwant 4mo agoName any tech job and I will tell you how it exploits the average people through economies of scale
- bluefirebrand 4mo agoI cut my teeth in tech building a regional classifieds website for a local newspaper Tell me all about how it was worse than the print classifieds that already existed I'm very curious to hear your take
- breppp 4mo agoNot the original poster, but moving classifieds online lost newspapers a whole lot of money, money that previously financed quality journalism, not to mention the people in charge of maintaining the classifieds ads business. If you are working for the newspaper, your job is a reaction to the death of the original business, and you are the automation that came in their stead
- tanvach 4mo agoThis is like saying cancer is perfectly normal.
- peteforde 4mo agoIs cancer not normal? 40-45% of people will get cancer in their lives. It's estimated that 25-30% of people, globally, enjoy hip-hop. Cancer is 50% more common than hip-hop. Is hip-hop normal?
- tanvach 4mo agoSo you're saying, you don't mind having cancer?
- peteforde 4mo agoI didn't say that. I didn't even come close to saying that. I am saying that when 40-50% of people will experience something, it is statistically very normal. In fact, it's technically "likely". In most cases, 40% is significantly better than Vegas odds.
- wiseowise 4mo ago> Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic. Let's not rewrite history, ok? VCs funded and killed professions, and now it's our head on the chopping block. You can always argue that "I just followed orders", and it would be true, but let's not create an impression that everyone working in tech is force of evil working against common people.
- hahahacorn 4mo agoEconomies of scale is how society lowers the cost of meeting the demand for things people want. Uber, Airbnb, and Meta have negative externalities that have gone “unpriced” in the market because our policy makers are incompetent. But at large, they’ve net benefitted society, many more times over than they’ve hurt anyone whose job was displaced from the cycle of innovation and those individuals have found new jobs, or adapted to compete (taxis making a comeback, except they’re not fucking scumbags anymore because they don’t have a monopoly). If you believe technology and innovation is characterized as “using economies of scale to exploit the average person” you’d necessarily come to some pretty weird positions throughout history. Take the natural ice trade for example. Were refrigerators an evil means of exploiting and displacing the 100,000 workers who powered the natural ice trade? Or was it a better solution to the public health hazards, brutal dangerous working conditions, and high price paid by society to the Ice Monopoly?
- Silagi 4mo agoI vehemently disagree that meta or airbnb have done more to benefit society than not, but I'll take the overall argument; that technology, on the whole, benefits society overall. Which is true, on the long term. But we have no reason to believe that AI will be different in that case. In the short term, technologies have absolutely been used to exploit the average person; the industrial revolution benefited us all over time, but tell that to the kids killed in early industrial manufacturing centers. Look at how the transition to globalization went in the 80's-10's; entire sections of the US were essentially shut down because of the improvements in communication technology, and unless you're in support of the current state of the US, you'd agree we're still dealing with the consequences of that. Even in your own case, there's an argument to be made that CFCs meant the overall damage to humanity was greater than the ice trade, just spread out over more people. The exploitation was similar, but it was less visible. Even if we've eventually reached a point where people were better off, you can't argue that the health of the average person was never exploited for the benefit of the few. To be clear, I'm not separating myself from this; I'm fully aware that work I've done has displaced people. I'm just chafing against the moralizing around it. It feels like the people making these arguments are trying to remove themselves from responsibility while continuing to build on top of companies like Amazon, that are built on top of exploiting people that absolutely cannot advocate for themselves.
- intended 4mo agoIf someone who has never had any major financial benefit from tech, but loved it all the same, criticizes AI, do they get a pass?
- elxr 4mo agoDepends what part of AI they say they don't agree with. Anyone with a reasonable, sound argument can give it a shot. Is a 100% local, open-weight model that you only use for learning purposes / generating questions meant just for you the same thing as criticizing the use of "AI" in large corporations replacing workers? How about DLSS 4 frame gen in a game? That's AI too, and pretty universally seen as neutral or positive by anyone who's aware of it. How about AI assisting doctors scanning for cancers in medical checkups? How about running google translate on a street sign when you're in a new country? Folks gotta be more specific than just saying they're anti-AI, because what does that statement even mean in practice?
- newaccountman2 4mo agoIndeed. This paragraph from the post could have just been written about the internet and all of the tech and companies it has enabled since ~1999: > People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment, exploited workers, theft from the people who can least afford it, the impact on people's cognitive skills, the centralisation of power, the spread of disinformation, the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths (not billionaire of course, that's always a safe one), and not endorsing (either distinctly or tacitly by using) AI.
- scoofy 4mo agoAutomobiles, steam trains, even electricity or the printing press… There has always been a compelling argument for ludditism, the protection of people in that moment (as if that moment would last forever). And that argument is always doomed to fail, because you can’t freeze society in amber. Whether it’s the lamplighters, the mule-drawn barge operators, or the scribes… we would do much better to have a social safety net and distributive taxation system so that we all win in Industrial Revolutions. But we won’t. The skilled artisans that are put out of work from their positions of leverage tend to have the political views of someone with leverage, so instead of communitarian instincts, they want to go back to when they had power.
- newaccountman2 4mo ago> And that argument is always doomed to fail, because you can’t freeze society in amber. Whether it’s the lamplighters, the mule-drawn barge operators, or the scribes… we would do much better to have a social safety net and distributive taxation system so that we all win in Industrial Revolutions. Agreed. I don't think it's the out-of-work "skilled artisans" who are to blame though, esp in the US.
- scoofy 4mo agoObviously there is no “blame” in complex systems, but over and over, folks with financial leverage tend to move immediately from a position of libertarian meritocracy to a position of regressive intervention at exactly the moment when their skill becomes automated. A society that promotes risk, plans for failure, and facilitates starting over, all while minimizing wealth inequality is a society that can sprint headlong into every new technology in a way that everyone benefits. The lining factor I see time and time again, is that folks see the world, philosophically, as static even though in one lifetime we start at the invention of the light bulb and end on the moon, and in the next, we start with the moon landing, and we’ve created artificial thinking with 23 years to spare. It’s a sad state of affairs. But what do I know, I live in a city with a massive housing crisis because one group finds construction of more homes as ruining their nice static lives.
- elxr 4mo agoThat's why almost no one notable in tech (both software and hardware) is taking this stance, or still has this stance with the current state of LLMs. Even the extremely talented devs who personally don't use LLMs don't have this extremist take that LLMs and AI tools are morally evil (??). It's obvious that tons of people have become better at their jobs because of it, it's obvious that it has already saved companies millions of hours. I understand that many don't like the copyright avoiding antics of these big AI companies, but to say that AI is a net negative on humanity is so completely idiotic that it makes me question their character in anything they do moving forward.
- insane_dreamer 4mo agoYou make a good point; but the scale of destruction is by no means the same now. Most of the US jobs were lost not to automation, but to outsourcing in pursuit of profits. A similar problem of corporate exploitation, but not so much a technological one.