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How 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?

by 59nadir 1mo ago

How 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 ago
Sure, 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 ago
  The pace of growth of hatred is new (thanks to AI, mostly), but it's been sitting at a simmer for 20 years.
  - Avicebron 1mo ago
    It'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 ago
  A 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 ago
    My experience with Uber is the opposite, FWIW.
  - gdulli 1mo ago
    TV has unskippable and targeted commercials now. The list goes on and on.
  - ishouldstayaway 1mo ago
    I 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 ago
      Whilst 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 ago
        Infuriating 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.
        chillfox 1mo ago
        The taxi experience was pretty great where I live and where I traveled. I guess we were experiencing different parts of the world.
        dwohnitmok 1mo ago
        To be clear the happy path for taxis for me was fine. When things worked things were quite smooth. But this thread is primarily about when things went off the happy path. If a taxi didn't show up, I'd usually have a disinterested dispatcher to talk with who might be able to send another in a half hour. If a taxi intentionally went the long way around to charge more, I'd have to have an argument with the cabbie about this and maybe things would go well maybe they wouldn't. While I didn't personally experience harassment from cabbies I definitely know people who have. So on and so forth. In all of these cases off the happy path the usual recourse back then was worse than the recourse today with e.g. Uber. Again the overwhelming majority of my taxi rides were fine. The overwhelming majority of my Uber rides are also fine. But when things go wrong they definitely went wrong worse with taxis than Uber rides for me.
- rc5150 1mo ago
  Whenever 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 ago
  It'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 ago
    It'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 ago
      Well, 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 ago
  The 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 ago
Because the products these companies produce are extremely popular, and people benefit from them.
inigyou 1mo ago
Powerful 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 ago
I 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 ago
  It 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 27d 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.

scrumper 1mo ago

Magical wishful thinking is as misguided as even the most rabid anti-tech critique. Your - piloto_ciego - needs will never be met by the abundance of the planet. Perhaps your great great great grandchildren may begin to live in such a free way, but you and everyone else alive now will not. There are too many people on the planet, wealth is too unevenly distributed, food production is too unevenly distributed, water is too unevenly distributed, energy production is too unevenly distributed; the only way anyone can get their needs met is by participating in an economy which can allocate and relocate those scarce resources. All AI is doing is taking an increasingly large share of those resources in pursuit of ensuring the survival of an ouroboros of circular funding between a tiny number of companies to the detriment of everyone else attempting to participate in that economy. AI may or may not prove to be a significant step on the ladder to the ultimate end of scarcity, but there is no possible way that anyone you could conceivably meet, much less be, will ever experience the kind of life liberated from toil that you wish for. Electricity promised to eliminate toil and bring us a life of leisure. It did not. Perhaps all technologies have this potential, AI included. That potential will never be realized because relentless and perpetual growth is a necessary precondition and justification for the development and expansion of such technologies, and that growth demands and consumes whatever excess human capacity that the technology freed up. The best you can hope for is to exploit the technology selfishly, carving out a life of scholarly pursuit and passion projects while rent-seeking on top of the economic work of humans who couldn't get there as fast as you. But that has been an option since the invention of money.

piloto_ciego 1mo ago
Dude, I'm building an off grid cabin in the woods. I already live pretty "freely." Dream bigger. We can change and make the world awesome! We have to want to though. > Electricity promised to eliminate toil and bring us a life of leisure. It did not. Perhaps all technologies have this potential, AI included. That potential will never be realized because relentless and perpetual growth is a necessary precondition and justification for the development and expansion of such technologies, and that growth demands and consumes whatever excess human capacity that the technology freed up. Also, this speaks to me as someone who has never used used a screw driver to turn a screw into a board. The drill driver has made it amazingly better. EDIT to add: Also, I've lived a subsistence lifestyle before, I'm fairly close to doing it again though I'll still need some money to roll through the household? Dream bigger buddy. It's not all doom and gloom.
- happytoexplain 1mo ago
  >Dream bigger. Ironically, this oversimplification is narrow-minded.
- inigyou 1mo ago
  Until the AI people use some political games to justify why your land actually belongs to them, and then come and kick you, the trespasser, off their land. Such games may involve property taxes, eminent domain, or similar.
  - piloto_ciego 1mo ago
    Maybe. But that's less of an issue where I'm at.
    - inigyou 1mo ago
      For now.
- scrumper 1mo ago
  > Also, this speaks to me as someone who has never used used a screw driver to turn a screw into a board. The drill driver has made it amazingly better. You are inadvertently proving my point. Yes an impact driver makes it easier to get a screw into a board, but a carpenter still works a full day. Technology's reducing effect on labor effort is always used to increase output, never to decrease input. > Dream bigger I am awake.
  - piloto_ciego 1mo ago
    I doubt you're "awake" in any sort of matter. The percentage of farm hands today is a lot lower than 200 years ago. Dream bigger. You're not awake, you're clinging to a fantasy where you get to be a special privileged member of society. That is done. We're not going back. You can sit here moaning about how you used to be special and important, or you can start doing the hard work of building a society where not having a job doesn't put your very survival at risk.