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

The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

newrepublic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 399 posts

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#151

Post by AshleyGrant »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #95
guzfip wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> $12k a year is plenty. You’ve just been raised above your natural standard I get where you're coming from. But this is politically unworkable, and for good reason. If AI increases productivity, that means more wealth, which means living standards should go up.

> $12k a year is plenty. You’ve just been raised above your natural standard

> I get where you're coming from.

You do? Have you priced out health insurance lately? I have. Insurance on HealthCare.gov for my partner and I would be $1700/month for what amounts to catastrophic coverage. It had around a $20k deductible and covered nothing other than an annual physical prior to hitting the deductible.

With $2k/month to work with between us, I guess we have to somehow find a place to live and eat on the remaining $300 as we pay for our functionally worthless health insurance since there is no way in hell we could afford to pay the deductible.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#152

Post by sumeno »

operatingthetan wrote: post #149
cortesoft wrote: post #44

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

I think you may be going too far, as in your critiques assume the tech is further along than it actually is. There are three fundamental problems for mass AI adoption/AGI: 1. Lack of memory/continuity 2. Lack of agency 3. Lack of self-awareness Based on my understanding of the basic 'loop' of an LLM, solutions for these may be decades off or not possible. Which leads me to the fourth problem: 4. Lack of compute To ge…

[flagged]

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#153

Post by Dwedit »

cortesoft wrote: post #44

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

I think you left out the part about AI being a plagiarism machine.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#154

Post by Gigachad »

autaut wrote: post #100
Tyrubias wrote: post #41

This was evident everywhere except within the AI industry itself. The rhetoric from many of the industry’s top leaders has been “this technology will eliminate millions of jobs, fundamentally reshape countless other jobs, and automate the use of lethal force, but we’re going to develop it anyways”. Many of the current economic woes, including mass layoffs, have been blamed on AI by the very executives conducting said…

I think tech ceo got a little bit too excited and their mask fell off and started saying “oh yeah, you don’t like it? Too bad nothing you can do about it”. You’ll see them quickly backpedal to woke 1.0 when it turns out they were a bit too quick about it.

And when people showed up at Sam Altmans house.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#155

Post by poly2it »

greggoB wrote: post #88
poly2it wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you been on Reddit recently? Anti-AI sentiment isn't limited to technical communities, but engaged with platform-wide. The hate is the content; apart from the rampant anti-intellectualism there is very little engagement with any material discussing the technologies in and of themselves.

I don't think you know what "mobilized" means - at least, it implies an actor with ulterior motives is driving this response in people. Usually political actors or the media are accused of this. What you're describing on Reddit sounds like a broad-based antipathy to AI, which is just... how a lot of people are feeling? You can criticise their motivation being based in emotions or vibes instead of facts and thoughts,…

Of course I know what mobilised means, but with these social medias, the platforms themselves are at play in shaping the conversations. To clarify, I think this type of anti-AI sentiment should be studied as part of a the baseline social culture of the platforms. I do not have a good answer to why it flourishes on them, other than the generic framing. Perhaps its a new type of technological conservatism?

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#156

Post by bobsmooth »

troosevelt wrote: post #60
cortesoft wrote: post #44

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it…

>Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies?

If we go back to a 60% corporate tax rate, for sure.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#157

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

operatingthetan wrote: post #149
cortesoft wrote: post #44

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

I think you may be going too far, as in your critiques assume the tech is further along than it actually is. There are three fundamental problems for mass AI adoption/AGI: 1. Lack of memory/continuity 2. Lack of agency 3. Lack of self-awareness Based on my understanding of the basic 'loop' of an LLM, solutions for these may be decades off or not possible. Which leads me to the fourth problem: 4. Lack of compute To ge…

All three of these problems are thoroughly solved by widely available tools.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#158

Post by spwa4 »

pydry wrote: post #79
troosevelt wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it…

Just as hyperloop was designed as a techbro pie in the sky notion to kill high speed rail, basic income as an idea is designed to kill more realistic attempts to shore up welfare, e.g. * A job guarantee like we had during the great depression * Lowering retirement age * Raise minimum wage * Expanding medicare to everyone It's worth remembering that if AI really can do everyone's jobs then it'll be wildly deflationary…

So the problem with 3 out of 4 of your challenges is that, right now, it means young people need to work more to achieve them. Money is an issue, but money by itself cannot solve it, it really needs to be backed with more people working. That's not going to happen, in fact, less people will work.

So without AI, the path forward is obvious: those 3 will become worse. Lowering retirement age, raising minimum wage, and expanding medicare won't happen without AI. They can't.

We already are reasonably close to a job guarantee. If unemployed people would accept any job, unemployment would drop by a lot. Not to zero, obviously, but a lot. Unemployment is also pretty low by historical standards, so fixing unemployment with a job guarantee can't fix much. We'll need something else.

> It's worth remembering that if AI really can do everyone's jobs then it'll be hyperdeflationary so no need to worry about pesky government spending on this stuff.

So yeah, I disagree. If you're going to assume AI will just jump to how capable it'll be 100 years from now, then you need to think a bit deeper. What AI effectively does, it provides capital-based labor. You buy a robot. Robot costs a lot, but operational expenses are marginal, energy and (maybe) "tokens". Add solar power, and let's say local AI becomes a thing, at least for normal robots, and you need nothing other than the initial cost of the robot.

Okay, so this will mean everything can be staffed with tens of thousands of these robots. Remote mine? No problem. 500 robots in your house? Why not. Cleaning very large facilities? Not a problem. Farm hundreds of square kilometers? Fine. Dig a canal to avoid the strait of Hormuz and just do it with shovels? Let's get to it. AI can be a universal machine that can do anything labor can achieve.

Obviously AI will massively increase the output of the economy, and people will figure out what to do with that, as people will want a shitload of things done. Which means the problem you're identifying will be trivial to solve, and we'll figure something out.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#159

Post by happytoexplain »

cortesoft wrote: post #44

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

No, you're backwards. The first point is definitely the most important and most tricky.

UBI is a dangerous distraction in this context. It's a mammoth cost to achieve an impoverished quality of life. It may be worth implementing in general, but it absolutely must stay out of the conversation about AI. It's like if the ruling class started announcing that they would like to imprison us all, and your "discussion" about the problem revolved around how we can make our future jail cells feel as nice as possible.

We are allowed to regulate businesses. We simply don't.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#160

Post by zmmmmm »

masijo wrote: post #56

AI has automated my favorite part of the job: coding. Gone is all the experience in clean code, good idioms, etc. All replaced by easily generated shitty code that can be removed and generated again as we please, until it works. No thought about the quality of code itself. Some companies are straight up forcing programmers to live in Claude Code and never even see the code, just write the spec. It’s disgusting. And t…

I think you do a good job capturing an actual microcosm of the real problems here at an emotional level - why people "hate" it.

(a) loss of fulfillment (b) lower quality of output and nobody will care so the world will just "degrade" and (c) a perceived lack of autonomy ("forcing", "you can't opt out") around how adoption itself is executed

Post reply on HN