To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#211

Post by newaccountman2 » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:29 PM UTC

Silagi wrote: post #31

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…

Indeed. 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.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#212

Post by bawolff » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:32 PM UTC

juleiie wrote: post #152

bawolff wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As vegans and vegetarians (and decades earlier, non-smokers) have shown, you can have a principled stance on something without forcing that stance on others. If you truly believe something is evil, i think that is difficult. Like imagine if someone said, i believe murder is wrong but i dont want to force that on others. Or, i dont really like slavery but that's just me and others should be slave owners if they feel…

There is no such thing as good person or evil person anywhere else other than in human society. It’s just a brain fart to make you cooperate and evolutionary survive. You don’t need to listen to this primitive instinct. You can just choose consciously what you think is the best. Do not share or propagate or promote this view however. Our society only works thanks to most people being slaves to these tremors. Sometime…

> You don’t need to listen to this primitive instinct. You can just choose consciously what you think is the best.

Which is why we have jails.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#213

Post by noitpmeder » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:33 PM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #176

nocman wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

Surely you jest. How often have we seen tech types say "learn to code", suggesting that people whose careers are disrupted just retrain into a different career, telling businesses to adapt or die (pre-LLM), or make condescending analogies about buggy whip makers on HN and /. before it? Quite a lot over the past 20 years. Software ate the world and the techbros were very blatantly unsympathetic about those affected by…

You're looking a massive selection bias. Most people in tech are _not_ saying those things (e.g. most software engineers in my circle would agree learning to code at a non trivial level is decidedly NON trivial). The vocal elite at the top of the tech pyramids (who have a vested interest in sweeping externalities under the rug) are the ones spewing that shit.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#214

Post by newaccountman2 » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:33 PM UTC

ashgf wrote: post #120

kenforthewin wrote: post #39

The weepiness and persecution complex is overwhelming.

[flagged]

> making the OP an outcast for his opinions. Just like he said.

Or the person, like many of us here, who come from diverse backgrounds working diverse jobs, simply thinks OP is a twat because the post is logically inconsistent and whiny.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#215

Post by tedmiston » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:34 PM UTC

beering wrote: post #101

toasty228 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who'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

The boring shit is still about eliminating labor that would have had to be done without computers. Automation is a core value of computing, back to automated switchboards and census tabulation.

Make Neo-Luddism Great Again! /s

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#216

Post by elxr » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:35 PM UTC

Silagi wrote: post #31

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…

That'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.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#217

Post by jFriedensreich » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:35 PM UTC

As a society its good for resilience to embrace small pockets of complete ai withdrawl. We should be happy some groups go through pain to keep best practices and processes alive that do not rely on any ai whatsoever. But most of these are unbearable for pragmatic normies to be around. This is made worse by the fact that seemingly a high percentage is not fully motivated by morals but by a deep insecurity that makes them militant, overly judgmental, bipolar thinkers and prone to weird authoritarian dynamics and exclusionism that i only know from the “vegan power” hatred for vegetarians and militant antifa s hatred for the “realist left”.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#218

Post by bawolff » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:37 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #174

bawolff wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As vegans and vegetarians (and decades earlier, non-smokers) have shown, you can have a principled stance on something without forcing that stance on others. If you truly believe something is evil, i think that is difficult. Like imagine if someone said, i believe murder is wrong but i dont want to force that on others. Or, i dont really like slavery but that's just me and others should be slave owners if they feel…

> If you truly believe something is evil, i think that is difficult. Yes, and that’s my point. Most vegans truly believe that meat equals murder. Yet the vast majority of them will go out for dinner with people they truly deeply believe are (indirect) murderers. This is indeed very difficult for them. Locking yourself out of society isn’t likely to help achieve any sort of moral progress.

> Locking yourself out of society isn’t likely to help achieve any sort of moral progress.

On the contrary, i think most moral progress (albeit also many social ills) has been wrought through social pressure.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#219

Post by scoofy » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:39 PM UTC

newaccountman2 wrote: post #211

Silagi wrote: post #31

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…

Indeed. 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…

Automobiles, 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.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#220

Post by tedmiston » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:42 PM UTC

Silagi wrote: post #210

binary132 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People 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 thi…

More 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'…

"Anyone who uses 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.