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

#201

Post by tptacek » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:20 PM UTC

mplanchard wrote: post #195

tptacek wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as long as you understand that this is how everybody else not in technology, from accountants to East Coast dockworkers and all points in between, have felt about everything we do in this field for the past 50 years. It's awfully tough to adopt a morally rigorous position about "lower compensation" when you're literally in the business of automating jobs away.

It does feel a bit karmic, doesn’t it? I’ve never worked in a part of tech that was explicitly doing this, but I still feel as though all the current anxiety and uncertainty I myself am currently going through is in some way “earned” by my participation in this industry.

A lot of things in the technology field's internal debate about AI feel extremely karmic to me.

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

#202

Post by newaccountman2 » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:21 PM UTC

I think it's possible to come up with cogent and principled anti-AI arguments. This post is not example of something like that lol

Numerous problems with it, but fundamentally a lot of their objections could apply to any post-internet tech. It seems like they just don't like AI.

Writer should also entertain the possibility that it turns out they just don't like tech, and AI just makes a lot of the negative aspects of tech more obvious.

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

#203

Post by noitpmeder » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:22 PM UTC

forinti wrote: post #60

noitpmeder wrote: post #18

I mean it's almost like having a moral stance on the assembly line, or calculators. If they truly do provide massive technological benefits, and it turns out the externalities aren't as bad as some are projecting, it's hard to argue AI is not another extremely useful tool in your tool belt. Now, if AI leads to global ruin/... obviously some people will be able to say "See! I knew this would happen!", but again, at th…

Calculators give you the right answer. AI gives you any answer. I work within a bureaucracy and instead of optimising processes and getting rid of useless documents, AI is being used to generate more useless text. It is the industrialisation of bureaucracy and it is a turbo powered waste of resources.

Then your issue isn't with AI, it's with your bureaucracy. Just because your company is holding it wrong doesn't mean the entire technology is morally fraught.

If your company's goal is to generate "more useless text" they would have done it with or without AI. AI just let's the peons responsible for producing that text do so significantly faster, with some percentage loss in "quality" baked in. Are you mad their jobs are easier? Was their text once not useless and now it is?

Again, it's like saying the conveyor belt is evil because it lets us generate more useless toys/candy/guns/... and research into improving the conveyor belt should instead be going toward more valuable things. However it ALSO has those effects on EVERYTHING. It lets you produce more drugs, books, food, clothes, necessities, and yes, some useless items too.

Same with AI. Sure you can use it to spew cat pictures, but you can also use it to generate significant quantities of non-trivial useful (not necessarily bullet proof, but undoubtedly _useful_) output in a fraction of the time and/or HUMAN capital (butts-in-seats, time-on-task, ...) than before. Now, as always, value is in the eye of the beholder (which is why your C suite gets giddy at all the useless text output).

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

#204

Post by joquarky » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:23 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #141

lazide wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Branding. LLM’s (as a term!) are too specific for the ‘conquer the world’ narratives the VCs want to justify the high valuations. Machine Learning sounds too technical. AI is pithy, and can be anything from skynet to… skynet. Or clippy, technically, but everyone seems to have forgotten about him . FOMO drives the valuation, and the more vagueness and ambiguity you can have, the easier it is to stoke it. And if the op…

I really like the idea of AI being the brand of whatever we are hyping so much that will inevitably fail spectacularly and turn the entire society against it for a couple of decades. The name basically means anything a computer can do, and has meant almost anything a computer does at some point. So it's not a very useful word anyway, no loss in letting marketers use it to whatever Tormentus Nexus they are working tow…

As an aside: why have we allowed marketing people to take over?

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

#205

Post by clapthewind » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:23 PM UTC

65 wrote: post #90

I do judge people for using AI. Especially engineers. Oh, you're not smart enough to know how to write your own code? You need your hand to be held? You need to write your little prompts because reading documentation is too hard? I'll keep my skills while your brain turns to mush.

Is it smart to pick a path that's probably not going to be appreciated anymore? One that's probably going to lead to unemployment?

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

#206

Post by adampunk » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:24 PM UTC

hyperhello wrote: post #181

adampunk wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. This is such a wild thing to bring up unprompted.

Would you assume he was a far-right nut job?

Would I need to assume?

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

#207

Post by arvid-lind » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:26 PM UTC

mplanchard wrote: post #195

tptacek wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as long as you understand that this is how everybody else not in technology, from accountants to East Coast dockworkers and all points in between, have felt about everything we do in this field for the past 50 years. It's awfully tough to adopt a morally rigorous position about "lower compensation" when you're literally in the business of automating jobs away.

It does feel a bit karmic, doesn’t it? I’ve never worked in a part of tech that was explicitly doing this, but I still feel as though all the current anxiety and uncertainty I myself am currently going through is in some way “earned” by my participation in this industry.

Really? Not sure if you like to work on your own cars, but would you also feel like you're accumulating negative karma for associating with the automotive and fossil fuel industries? We're not responsible for the world that is here right now, but we have to figure out how to operate within it. The idea that "we earned this" like we're all at fault for the state of things seems pretty far off.

Not trying to say you're wrong but long way of saying don't be so hard on yourself, its not like you're Elon, Altman, any of the other awful figures steering our tech world right now.

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

#208

Post by layla5alive » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:27 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…

"Our society only works thanks to most people being slaves to these tremors."

If everyone defects, the system breaks down. Morality is good and it is actually logical - it solves the prisoners dilemma and pushes cooperation instead of defection. It also reduces harm and has lots of other good properties. I feel that how we affect others matters, but even if you're just a sociopath doing the math, defecting is a strategy that burns things down at scale, not a smart one. Tit for tat with forgiveness is not only morally aligned, but also more prosperous in scenarios that aren't just one-off interactions with strangers.

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

#209

Post by newaccountman2 » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:27 PM UTC

hahahacorn wrote: post #160

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…

Economies of scale is how society lowers the cost of meeting the demand for things people want. Uber, Airbnb, and Meta have negative externalities that have gone “unpriced” in the market because our policy makers are incompetent. But at large, they’ve net benefitted society, many more times over than they’ve hurt anyone whose job was displaced from the cycle of innovation and those individuals have found new jobs, or…

I am not weighing in on the fundamental issue you are debating with the other person, but clearly Facebook has provided no benefit to society lol wth

It's just a parasitic, largely useless, and often actively harmful advertising machine. The only possible positive it has done is transfer a lot of money and capital to employees who often come from middle-class backgrounds.

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

#210

Post by Silagi » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:28 PM UTC

binary132 wrote: post #97

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…

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'm not even saying they should necessarily be held accountable; just that moralizing about it is hypocritical.