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Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

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Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

#81

Post by imaginationra »

The tech industry took essential human things away from regular people and sold it back to them as metered services.

Social skills, friends, short term memory, dating, sex, intelligence etc

Tech intentionally exploits regular people for its own gain, intentionally breaking peoples brains for techs profit.

In short "tech" doesn't care about anything but the "bottom line" its the same as the military industrial complex- people break, people die, genocide happens and we empower it... who cares we're getting rich.

No one sees the faces of the military industrial complex but tech CEO's(the faces of the industry) proudly smile for the camera's and rub their billionaire lifestyles in the publics faces.

In short people hate the "tech industry" because it has taken everything away from everyone while enriching a few- and its all public.

Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

#82

Post by deepvibrations »

nekusar wrote: post #41

Because its... 1. All about lock in. Trap customers and their data. 2. No purchases, only rentals. You never own anything. 3. Agreements are worth nothing. Today's feature is tomorrows premium feature. 4. Gamification adds an extra edge of badness on the hopes that you'll get what you want. 5. "Updates" rarely help, but almost always harm, in the name of "security" 6. Mergers and acquisitions means nothing is ever sa…

So could it be Capitalism?

Linear growth is a failure; only infinite, exponential growth is acceptable.

Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

#83

Post by chrisweekly »

nyeah wrote: post #29

Yeah. "Hate": https://www.kapwing.com/blog/why-does-the-public-hate-the-te... Re the linked piece, I'm concerned about people saying "they hate us" when they really mean "they disagree with us" or "they seem skeptical of what we say." It can easily become click bait. The language changes, sure ... but equating disagreement with the emotion of hatred? Maybe that language change is a bad idea? Just spitballing here.

I'm with you in spirit wrt lowering the temp and avoiding clickbait. I want the internet and the world to be a better place with more peace and loving kindness, creativity and connection. But in this case -- describing the general public's feelings towards the ultra-rich, IMHO "disagree" and "skeptical" are just too watered-down; they don't convey all the legitimate feelings of resentment, fear, distaste, distrust, indignation, etc that feed into something typically described as "hate". ):

Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

#84

Post by ben_w »

nemomarx wrote: post #13

With all the money floating around in tech you'd think PR would be solveable. But you still have AI founders going out in public and saying they want to get rid of jobs instead of some pitch about how easy work will get or you'll be happier or etc. Why?

> But you still have AI founders going out in public and saying they want to get rid of jobs instead of some pitch about how easy work will get or you'll be happier or etc. Why?

Even if they did, would you believe them? Here's Zuckerberg on how he sees "Personal Superintelligence": https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/

Compare that to the $1.4 trillion lawsuit now in the news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48817682

Or compare Musk's promises to what's delivered. His self-driving timelines has its own Wikipedia page; how much he opined DOGE could save could be falsified by the top-level breakdown of the US federal budget. He used to be worried about AI, "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon", now he's saying he wants more Tesla shares for the "robot army" which his SpaceX presentations say will be a billion* strong.

* though if you just naïvely apply the numbers here, that factory will also be "on fire": https://www.terafab.ai

Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

#86

Post by whilenot-dev »

muvlon wrote: post #53
nemomarx wrote: post #13

With all the money floating around in tech you'd think PR would be solveable. But you still have AI founders going out in public and saying they want to get rid of jobs instead of some pitch about how easy work will get or you'll be happier or etc. Why?

Why? Because their messaging is not addressing the general public, but their investors. And they've realized that their investors are really receptive to panic-baiting (we'll get rid of jobs, ASI is right around the corner, p(doom) = 25% etc).

This doesn't answer GPs question, though: Why is a panic-baiting "we'll get rid of jobs" better than some gain-baiting "we'll make your workforce 10x more productive"? Why is panic a better response to investors than gain?

We got:

- A: "AI helps in automating tedious tasks"

- B: "Your workforce can be more motivated and productive"

- C: "You can do more with fewer people"

Why not advertise A → B, stop there and let their customers do the reasoning for B → C themselves? Why go straight to a hyperbolic A → C and swallow all the hate that comes with it?

My own presumption is that we got that strange fetish for optimization (C) and just don't trust our own ambitions to make the potential gain in productivity (B) work any other way.

Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

#87

Post by l337h4x0rz »

purpleflame1257 wrote: post #54
FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As always, capitalism can be counted on to destroy anything it touches.

Without the promise of return most promising technology would never have been created.

Agreed. Such is the duality.

Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

#88

Post by slibhb »

To the extent that people hate tech, it's because:

1. Tech is our "new money". New money is always hated, by every generation

2. Tech represents change and the human animal dislikes change. Most people are okay with everything that exists when they turn 25 and dislike everything that appears after

3. Tech represents capitalism in a pure form. Creative destruction reigns; companies and apps can rise and fall overnight. Ways of life are precarious and the constant churn bothers people

All three really come down to people disliking change. Instead of hating/fearinf change and dynamism, people should look inward. Establish a routine. Exercise. Garden. Read. Cook. It's more within your power than ever before to decide what you like and pursue it at your own pace. But don't expect the external world to meet your desire for stasis.

Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

#89

Post by ben_w »

jordanb wrote: post #56
ymolodtsov wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few founders do this and the ones who do are solving their own problems. For Anthropic it's primarily hiring. But as a PR person I can guarantee you it's not possible to go around such perception shifts through money alone.

"Get rid of jobs" was a pitch to investors. They needed a new trillion dollar idea. For it to be worth a trillion dollars it has to take a trillion dollars from somewhere. They looked at the economy and decided the only place it could come from is white collar payroll. Unfortunately for them more than just the investors were paying attention to the pitch. So now they are trying to say " of course it won't unemploy pe…

> For it to be worth a trillion dollars it has to take a trillion dollars from somewhere.

Musk's SpaceX TAM is roughly as you say, it's "subsume all currently existing desk jobs", which makes it simultaneously absurdly over-confident in the short term and treating this all as a zero-sum game where those jobs just go away and no new (potentially also automatable) jobs get invented, which in turn says he doesn't think anywhere is going to shift from primary and secondary economies to tertiary economies.

Zuckerberg may be full of himself, but does at least (pay someone else to?) write a vision that at least has growth-sounding phrases in it: https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/

Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

#90

Post by ben_w »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #36
luco17 wrote: post #9

Bankers had it bad for a long time. Now it's our turn!

It's the same people. Before 2008 they used to go into banking, now they entered tech instead.

I'd say this explains why all the code is bad now, but I remember what it used to look like too.
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