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

101–110 of 566 posts

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

#101

Post by mlinsey »

mystraline wrote: post #98
mlinsey wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's definitely too broad a statement. I'd argue encryption, oral contraceptives, and the printing press were all strongly decentralizing.

The Public won the encryption battle against the USG and ITAR idiocy. Well, until climate destroying shitcoin. Thats a big Lose. The printing press had sooo much state violence over that everywhere. Oral contraceptives are a fight the USA is losing to the extremist christian republicans. Right now the line is right on Misoprostol. And shithole states like Texas even criminalize day-after pills and 'suspect' miscarria…

You're describing efforts by powerful institutions to squash the technology, which they definitely try to do, but that's just a strong signal that the technology itself is inherently opposed to centralized power, not an enabler of it.

Other technologies like surveillance (and, perhaps, AI) are more clearly centralizing and enabling of power.

The difference matters a lot if you're having mixed feelings about working in technology.

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

#102

Post by timoth3y »

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

I think that is the core truth of the matter. Technology itself does not make life better.

I recently published an article about the Luddites. If you look at their actual demands, they were not anti-tech. They were labor activists. Life got much, much worse for most people in the industrial revolution until the laws they advocated were finally implemented.

https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-real-luddites-would-have...

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

#103

Post by dominotw »

camillomiller wrote: post #32
_doctor_love wrote: post #27

I love the quote in there from Boz that basically says "no you can't opt out fuck off"

People focus a lot on how Zuckerberg is a deranged sociopath, but I think Bosworth should get the same criticism if not worse. The good face he put on while fucking over the world is utterly disgusting. I got to a point where I just wish ill fate to these people, because there is really no other process by which they can be slowed down or stopped.

[flagged]

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

#104

Post by bossyTeacher »

puttycat wrote: post #99
bossyTeacher wrote: post #10

Not going to lie, I have no pity for the tech employees of a company that has spent most of its existence making the world a worse place. They are finally getting a taste of the medicine Facebook has been giving to everyone in the last 2 decades.

I agree, but we do owe them PyTorch and React.

The world would be fine with any of the many JS libraries/frameworks

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

#105

Post by zzrrt »

joshribakoff wrote: post #55
Ifkaluva wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the difference between 200k/year and 800k/year didn't feel much day to day (other than the ability to buy a house or something, and feel safe with a retirement nest egg) I can’t believe I read this sentence, lol. 800k is the ability to buy a house and support a family on a single income. Do you see so many people lamenting the days when this was possible? So many memes about the lifestyle Homer Simpson could provid…

If someone has a 10m portfolio, it really is irrational to chase a higher w-2.

How many do you think build that portfolio from $200k/yr? The point is an extra 600k, at least for several years, is life-changing when managed wisely. I could perhaps see the GP's point about "day to day" feeling, if you acclimate to the baseline of financial security that having that much money buys you. I'm only assuming though, having never had the opportunity to experience GP's claim about that kind of comp.

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

#106

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

bananaflag wrote: post #18
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

Well, I love to take showers, which involve a lot of tech like running water and water heaters and soap which I can buy from the supermarket. I lived in places without any of those and I wouldn't want to do it again.

While I believe the comment you are replying to may be too broad considering "all tech", I also strongly agree with the overall sentiment (and in particular I commend ost-ing for putting a general feeling I think a lot of people have so clearly and succinctly into words).

As a Gen Xer, I grew up with a strong belief in the "goodness" of technology, of its power to make people's lives better and to ameliorate suffering. So after 25 years of seeing so much invested into technology that actively makes people's lives worse (e.g. ad-tech, social media algorithms), and even conservatively just results in the huge accumulation of wealth and power to the very few, I can't help but feel extremely disillusioned.

Yes, I like showers and soap and running water, but I rarely see the type of economic investment into tech these days that will have as broad of a beneficial impact as running water did.

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

#107

Post by SanityPlease »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #80
iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 condem…

I recently saw a razor commercial where a man was shaving his cheek. I immediately condemned the company for being Nazi-adjacent propaganda since the actor was one step away from giving himself a Hitler mustache.

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

#108

Post by daveguy »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #54
layer8 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Efficiency gains are more important than people not having to spend their working life with soul-crushing tasks? I don’t quite follow.

The assumption is that orders of magnitude more people will benefit from the efficiency gains, like it was the case in agriculture automation or factory work automation. In those cases, that led to a transition period, nowadays only a small fraction of the human population is working to produce food, and their job is more about planning, finance and orchestration of machine work, but many specialised jobs were lost o…

Yes, eventually we will all be able to enjoy our delicious algorithm, attention, and data sandwiches on our lunch breaks.

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

#110

Post by vrganj »

dominotw wrote: post #103
camillomiller wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People focus a lot on how Zuckerberg is a deranged sociopath, but I think Bosworth should get the same criticism if not worse. The good face he put on while fucking over the world is utterly disgusting. I got to a point where I just wish ill fate to these people, because there is really no other process by which they can be slowed down or stopped.

[flagged]

[flagged]
Post reply on HN