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Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It's Almost Hard to Believe
- voidmain0001 1mo agoI doubt any of the cited CEOs will care. “And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake I shake it off, I shake it off (whoo-hoo-hoo)” - Taylor Swift.
- throwaway27448 1mo agoI don't think anyone is worried about a CEO's ego, lol. Society can only protect them so much in a material sense... just ask Brian Thompson.
- lukewarm707 1mo agoafter the rise comes the fall.
- 59nadir 1mo agoHow oblivious are people to the world that they think this is somehow strange or hard to believe? Why would they like any of the tech CEOs, or CEOs in general? It's hard to see why basically anyone would at this point.
- bbor 1mo agoSure, CEOs are rarely appreciated in general. But the anti-tech sentiment is absolutely a new and rapidly growing beast. It’s different — trust me.
- happytoexplain 1mo agoThe pace of growth of hatred is new (thanks to AI, mostly), but it's been sitting at a simmer for 20 years.
- Avicebron 1mo agoIt's a crisis of trust, on that point I do find myself agreeing with Dario. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323245 edit: There are solutions to this. See link.
- chillfox 1mo agoA lot of tech recently has just made things worse. 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.
- throw-the-towel 1mo agoMy experience with Uber is the opposite, FWIW.
- gdulli 1mo agoTV has unskippable and targeted commercials now. The list goes on and on.
- ishouldstayaway 1mo agoI agree wholeheartedly with your first sentence here. But I find it difficult to think of a worse example you could have picked than taxis. For all Uber's many faults, the taxi companies were worse. Hell they're still worse. Are you old enough to remember the bad old days?
- jazzcomputer 1mo agoWhilst you can argue that services may have improved in some respects, the action towards resolution to problems is carefully monitored to help as least as possible and insulate accountability within a blanket of 'help' agents.
- dwohnitmok 1mo agoInfuriating as it is, this is still better than with the bad old days of taxis, which usually had even worse resolution and accountability. It sounds like people don't quite grasp just how bad the taxi experience was.
- rc5150 1mo agoWhenever somebody qualifies a statement with "trust me", my first inclination and deepest instinct is to ignore that statement. Saying it doesn't make you more believable or authoritative on... anything. Trust me.
- piloto_ciego 1mo agoIt's just Neo Luddite stuff... we don't have to accept the current status quo. Good lord I'd love it if all my needs were met by the abundance of the planet and I could spend my days working on projects I liked and exploring. Why can't anyone see beyond their job?
- defrost 1mo agoIt's not the no job part that troubles them, it's the question of where basic levels of food, clothing, shelter are going to come from, and the means to have objects of desire and the freedom to travel. 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.
- piloto_ciego 1mo agoWell, those are political decisions, and WE (not the nebulous "they") are who make those decisions. 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!
- kakwa_ 1mo agoThe anti-tech has been there for a while. 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.
- mitchdoogle 1mo agoBecause the products these companies produce are extremely popular, and people benefit from them.
- graemep 1mo agoThey are widely used but not liked and net benefits are arguable.
- gitaarik 1mo agoThey are liked by many though. And net benefits are arguable
- preg_match 1mo agoThey’re useful right now, under the explicit pretense that their goal is to literally ruin your life. No more work, I guess you die now, bye bye. 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?”
- gitaarik 1mo ago[flagged]
- apple4ever 1mo agoEven if both are true (which is arguably), it's only at the current price point. When prices start to match what it costs, that will change greatly.
- kakwa_ 1mo agoWell, we are talking about the CEOs, not the companies. 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.
- inigyou 1mo agoPowerful people are almost always surrounded by an insulating layer of people who tell them what they want to hear. 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.
- rwz 1mo agoI genuinely find it strange. Like, I can understand intellectually why those people might dislike AI CEOs, but I personally disagree and find most of the reasons to hate them pretty dumb. 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.
- gilbetron 29d agoIt is "pretty dumb" to hate on people who recognize they potential world ending technology they are working on but still do it anyway with no controls? The same people that drool over the possibility that they could rule the world via AI and robots?
- rwz 28d ago> working on but still do it anyway with no controls? 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.
- echelon 1mo agoYoung people don't know who AI CEOs are without the media apparatus teaching them AI is bad. 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.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- atomicnumber3 1mo agoYeah has nothing to do with all the "permanent underclass" stuff right?
- echelon 1mo agoNot gonna happen with open source.
- breadramen 1mo ago[dead]
- ohyoutravel 1mo agoAnd yet AI CEOs preach the “AI will take your job and you’ll be homeless” narrative so hard.
- toomuchtodo 1mo agoTheir investment narrative, enterprise value, and potential liquidity event depends on this proclamation, regardless of how true it is.
- arjie 1mo agoThese popularity contests are won and lost based on marketing content on TikTok. If the opinions of young people were relevant they'd be appropriately shifted on demand. Few of them are reasoned positions so they can be shifted one way or the other with targeted advertising.
- bogzz 1mo agoAnd this kind of thinking is part of the reason behind the hatred.
- bagacrap 1mo agoIf you had not noticed, these AI companies already are advertising very heavily directly at the youth. OpenAi in particular is trying really hard to convince the college age crowd they are cool, though others (Google, Anthropic) have followed suit.
- Finnucane 1mo agoThe title is wrong: it is easy to believe.
- piskov 1mo ago“Hate” for “Don’t trust” seems like a pure clickbait material
- mvlipwig 1mo agoThis is anecdotal, but "hate" is absolutely a good descriptor here
- sthkr 1mo agoAutomation is such an old concept invented back in the 1st century AD. Furthermore, I don't see people hating the CEOs of Siemens, Honeywell, Schneider Electric, ABB, Yokogawa, Emerson, Allen Bradley, GE Fanuc, Kuka, Hyundia, Mitsubishi etc. They've been automating entire industries & manufacturing with their controllers (PLCs, DCS etc), SCADA, HMI & systems for decades. The first PLC was invented by General Motors back in 1968. China has entire dark factories making phones and their electric cars. The media is only crying now because their cushy office, journalism and art jobs are slowly going away.
- add-sub-mul-div 1mo agoI don't come down on anyone for failing to foresee how the web 2.0/social-media/streaming eras would evolve to be used against us more than for us. I'm as guilty as anyone. But in 2026 there's no excuse for failing to apply lessons from the last decade or two to extrapolate where AI is going.
- lithocarpus 1mo agoEven to whatever extent this is what's happening, a stopped clock is right twice a day applies.
- HDBaseT 1mo agoYes, and when they replaced the manual slow looms with fast machines, people lost jobs, people went homeless, families were destroyed. 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.
- insane_dreamer 1mo agoI'm honestly tired of these comments as they fail to understand what is happening today is not the same as what happened 50 years ago. 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".
- RivieraKid 1mo agoI'm not that young anymore but when I hear Dario Amodei speak and gesticulate enthusiastically about how AI will soon make my job redundant, from a positio of someone who can retire now and who benefits from AI possibly replacing workers, it's very hard to like him.
- bbor 1mo agoTalk about shooting the messenger…
- solid_fuel 1mo agoThe CEO of a major AI company is not “the messenger”
- JustResign 1mo agoA CEO of a large AI company is hardly just a "messenger" here. Come on now.
- superze 1mo agoHe is just the poor little head of the snake.
- bbor 1mo agoI… yes, he is. He wasn’t born when this was put in motion by Turing in 1950, and he quit OpenAI to try to stick to their original mission, which was exclusively and ambitiously to prevent what most (who cared to look at it) assumed was inevitable. 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!
- DecoPerson 1mo agoThe Butlerian Jihad is coming. It will happen sooner than we think. It will start with Australia, where the popular vote matters the most for political power. “Vote for the Greens! We’ll ban AI! We’ll bring your jobs back! Your savings account will earn interest again! The AI scams will stop!” All false promises, of course. The laws will be pathetic: “Prohibited digital intelligence — any digital system capable of learning, adapting, remembering, recalling, generating, or interpreting information of a textual, visual, audio, interactive or other form.” It will be the Minister’s choice regarding which companies are in the (new) enforcement agency’s crosshairs. Misunderstood situations (like a Tesla running over a child that it didn’t detect) will be used as the war cry. “AI is dangerous! AI cannot be trusted! AI is being used by criminals!” I hope my prediction is wrong.
- legobmw99 1mo agoA democratic movement leading to increased regulation, even if you think such a thing would be misguided, is hardly a jihad…
- binary132 1mo agoIf there will be any Butlerian Anything, it will be a reaction to the excruciatingly pathetic attempts at legislating the problem into a slightly smaller problem.
- chillfox 1mo agoThat actually sounds pretty good to me.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1mo agoTechnology is not cool anymore.
- Gud 1mo agoTechnology was not cool, it was for us the nerds. The nerds started making money, so the money people got into it. 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.
- jefurii 1mo agoWhat's so surprising? The AI CEOs hate them and are trying to destroy the world they live in along with their job prospects.
- add-sub-mul-div 1mo agoThis makes me think of last year when Adobe made a Bluesky account and got shouted off the platform within a day for no other reason than Adobe sucks. I have hope that it signals a trend that certain audiences are simply starting to exercise taste.
- strenholme 1mo agoHere’s a Reddit thread on Adobe being shouted down on BlueSky: https://old.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/1juptdx/adobe_briefly_joined_bluesky_before_being_bashed/ 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/BlueskySocial/comments/1juptdx/adobe_briefly_joined_bluesky_before_being_bashed/ https://archive.ph/20260817024427/https://www.reddit.com/r/B...
- m463 1mo agoAre there any CEOs people do trust? (I wonder how it compares if someone made a list of politicians) 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
- bagacrap 1mo agoThey are all slimeballs but how does Zuck have a non-zero trust rating?
- intended 1mo agothe data was distrust: > 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.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- shirro 1mo agoI heard my 12yo uses "AI" as a synonym for crap in a context which had nothing to do with machine learning. There is a pronounced and growing disconnect between the fervently pro-AI messaging on platforms like HN and regular people. Anti-AI sentiment goes deep and has momentum. A few billion dollars of marketing and influencer spend isn't going to turn it around. When the bubble deflates as most people feel it must I think it will only reinforce the negativity.
- dofm 1mo ago> I heard my 12yo uses "AI" as a synonym for crap in a context which had nothing to do with machine learning. The kids are alright.
- Grimblewald 1mo agonot really difficult. Genocide is a rather niche thing to like, and supporting it puts you in lockstep with those perpetrating.
- ggoo 1mo agoThe young people are probably on to something. They are the future after all.
- Razengan 1mo agoMore likely it's the politicians and lawyers etc. that are afraid of AI empowering the peasant class, so they're telling the commoners to divert their angst against AI. 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.
- smegger001 1mo ago>Oh AI will take our jobs..? LET IT!! 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.
- kj4211cash 1mo agoI wonder how much of this is caused by income inequality. There are some young people I talk to that are genuinely worried about whether AI will take all the jobs. But there are a lot more that rightfully realize that they probably can't afford the middle class life their parents had and are annoyed at all the money AI is hoovering up and how rich these CEOs are. And that's the surface level. There's all sorts of resentment that hasn't really been thought through and wouldn't exist if we had the sort of real growth in lower- and middle-class incomes that we used to.
- cucumber3732842 1mo agoIt's not the inequality. It's the lack of hope for a better future. Nobody cares how rich the richest people are when their lives are getting better.
- mvlipwig 1mo agoI'm skeptical of the income inequality hypothesis as the US Gini has been mostly stagnant for 20 years (as per https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA). I'd imagine that (social|) media has a fairly large impact on this phenomenon as it makes inequality more visible than before.
- kj4211cash 1mo agoYou're probably right about (social) media being a factor but overindexing on Gini. Here's a chart that shows dramatically rising wealth gaps in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States#/media/File:1962-_Net_personal_wealth_-_average_in_percentile_ranges_-_linear_scale_-_US.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite... 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.
- red-iron-pine 1mo agobeen happening since the 80s mate, and everyone knows it
- newsomix9xl 1mo agoBlaming a tough job market on AI, and claiming AI pivots are the reasons for layoffs, while claiming AI can destroy humanity. Who could have seen this coming?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- mvlipwig 1mo agoAs a young person, the data I would like to see on this topic are how AI/tech CEOs compare to CEOs on other industries. I would be surprised if Nadella polled significantly lower than the median non-tech CEO, based on gen Z's opinion of CEOs.
- frm88 1mo agoAccording to Blind he did with only 30% (2023) https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1961mql/best_worst_ceos/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1961mql/best_...
- tqi 1mo agotldr ad funded industry claims key that ceos of competitors for clicks are "hated by young people"
- Ekaros 1mo agoUnless you are cheerleader hoping to eventually be a CEO. Why would you particularly ever like this class of people? Or in financialised economy ever trust them to do anything but to maximise some metric affecting the price of the stock or whatever. 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.
- tryingtolearn 1mo agoI came across a video in my YouTube feed - “where are all the serial killers”. 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. https://youtu.be/iRgin1tWIT8 https://youtu.be/iRgin1tWIT8
- insane_dreamer 1mo agoNot at all hard to believe young people hate billionaires who are actively trying to destroy their (young people's) futures for their (B's) own personal benefit. And anyone who still says "oh, they'll find new jobs, Industrial Revolution, Luddites, etc." is clearly not thinking.
- insane_dreamer 1mo agostruck a nerve with the HN crowd I see :)
- Mathnerd314 25d agoI read the title and the concept I had was to replace highly-paid CEOs with AI. Given the concept of co-ops etc. that seems like it would be a popular idea.