Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 566 posts

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#71

Post by [deleted] »

fidotron wrote: post #33
ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

Let's go there: this is what the Unabomber was on about, and there has long been an effort to stop people noticing this. Ultimately you end up with either going for totalitarianism (either to arrest development in the status quo, maintain a state of anarcho primitivism or technocratic tedium) or we resist that and break out by trying to forge forward into some unknown unchartered territory. In practice we have no cho…

[deleted]

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#72

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

kogasa240p wrote: post #41
deanCommie wrote: post #19

Every big tech company's embrace of AI is making all of their employees miserable. Whereas if you're half-competent and at a startup, the AI is an incredible opportunity to try to leap ahead while the prices are subsidized (by the big tech behemoths fighting wth each other) The reason is a complete inversion of Ownership and Agency. For a decade of ZIRP, big tech convinced its employees that they're "changing the wor…

Good post >2021 was the first crack. The comps went crazy, half the industry turned over, and the ones who didn't felt a bitter sting where it became blatantly clear that all the new arrivals were just in it for the $$$, and the companies were willing to pay for the backfills but not to reward the loyalty of the missionaries. Also SVB collapsed in late 2022, notice that AI hype started right after.

Sigh, if it actually collapsed, it would have been fine. Summers saved it depositors before it collapse. I still don't get how that was not a story on a par with 2008 ( or maybe it wasn't because the fallout was avoided ).

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#73

Post by sardukardboard »

bachmeier wrote: post #12

> it is cutting jobs to offset its A.I. spending, saying last month that it would slash 10 percent of its work force. > Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees’ consumption of “tokens,” a unit of A.I. use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make…

A funny Goodhart’s Law parallel showed up in during GPT-5.1 training, where the model was rewarded for using the web search tool, so it learned the behavior of superficially using web search to calculate “1 + 1” and not utilize the result.

https://alignment.openai.com/prod-evals/

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#75

Post by ajdegol »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #46
rglover wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some circles, he goes by Uncle Ted .

To quote a movie: In the 1960's there was a young man graduated from the University of Michigan. Did some brilliant work in mathematics. Specifically bounded harmonic functions. Then he went on to Berkeley, was assistant professor, showed amazing potential, then he moved to Montana and he blew the competition away.

But you forgot about Vickers

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#76

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

"Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation"

My theory is that AI and robotics have the potential to break capitalism as we know it. We will probably reach a point where machines will be better than humans at pretty much anything and there will be almost no need for workers who just do a job (like most of us). But if nobody has money to buy things then there is no point in producing anything. Not sure where this will be going but I am pretty sure the capitalists will not voluntarily share the gains.

In theory all this progress should be great and exciting for humanity but without changing the system there may be dark times coming for most of us. I always have to think of Marshall Brain's "Manna" story. It may be a spot on prediction of things to come.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#78

Post by tejohnso »

idle_zealot wrote: post #15
krackers wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate must depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society must be highly organized and decisions have to be made that affect very large numbers…

I don't know what you're quoting, but I wish it were the case that something affecting a million people granted each affected individual about a one-millionth share in the decision. I don't think that would always yield good outcomes, but at least it would be democratic. Structures that enable that are what we should be building.

With our level of technology I don't see why we couldn't have that kind of decision directly put into the hands of individuals rather than leave it to "representatives" or worse yet corporations that aren't even required to ask. Maybe I'm not thinking through the difficulties well enough, be what we have with elected representatives campaigning on one set of ideals and then voting the complete opposite way is unacceptable. At least, that should be grounds for imprisonment. Maybe that would be sufficient to get the representative voting system working well enough.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#79

Post by kingofmen »

idle_zealot wrote: post #15
krackers wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate must depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society must be highly organized and decisions have to be made that affect very large numbers…

I don't know what you're quoting, but I wish it were the case that something affecting a million people granted each affected individual about a one-millionth share in the decision. I don't think that would always yield good outcomes, but at least it would be democratic. Structures that enable that are what we should be building.

That is why the writer specified "on average", which clearly remains true, at least in the case that the decisionmaker is part of the affected group. The optimistic part is in assuming that latter.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#80

Post by JuniperMesos »

iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #53
fidotron wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's go there: this is what the Unabomber was on about, and there has long been an effort to stop people noticing this. Ultimately you end up with either going for totalitarianism (either to arrest development in the status quo, maintain a state of anarcho primitivism or technocratic tedium) or we resist that and break out by trying to forge forward into some unknown unchartered territory. In practice we have no cho…

Not so long ago, I have come to a rather unpleasant realization that whether a lot of that will happen, will depend heavily on whether the ones currently trying to make technology control every facet of our lives decide to allow society get dumber first ( think Idiocracy, which AI very much could allow ) or not in which case it is anyone's guess, because people will still have some basic skills and memories of what c…

The thesis of Idiocracy is that society gets dumber in the future because intelligence is mostly genetically-determined and smarter people systematically have fewer children than dumber people, i.e. literal evolutionary selection against human intelligence over many human generations. This is clear in the first several minutes of the movie. People who recognize that this is what that movie is saying often then condemn it for being Nazi-adjacent pro-eugenics propaganda.

In the logic of Idiocracy, the way that an AI would "allow" the future society portrayed in the movie is by letting dumb people systematically have more kids than smart people, and "not allowing" this would entail some kind of coercive eugenics policy aimed at getting smart people to have more kids than they would otherwise be inclined to.

Post reply on HN