Live data from Hacker News

Bernie Sanders: "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear"

wsj.com

51–60 of 83 posts

Re: Bernie Sanders: "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear"

#51
post #35

It’s a threat to employment, stability, and democracy. AI is going to solidify the concentration of wealth and power like never before. It’s why so many young people fear being in the “permanent underclass”. I haven’t agreed with socialists historically but we need to change our economic and political system to have more socialism than before, and especially to reduce the concentration in the hands of a few individua…

Explain why this stance, repeated often throughout history at the first sight of innovation (the plow, the car, electricity, phones, the internet, etc), and wrong every single time, is correct now.

> Explain why this stance, repeated often throughout history at the first sight of innovation (the plow, the car, electricity, phones, the internet, etc), and wrong every single time, is correct now.

The scale and the speed of the changes brought about by AI are almost certainly going to be far greater than anything we've ever seen in the past. Scale matters. The entire value of LLMs is proof that scale matters.

Re: Bernie Sanders: "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear"

#52
AI is the best thing that happened to America in the last decade, and I dearly hope that politicians don't try to ruin it the way they're ruining other parts of the country.

I respect some of Bernie's positions, but his stance on tech is dangerous.

Re: Bernie Sanders: "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear"

#53
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posted when Silicon Valley was awake and on a break from the Easter Monday working hours.

I don't understand what you mean - is this sarcasm directed at me or the Bernie disagreers?

The rich SV worker is overwhelmingly pro-capitalism and techno-optimist; Bernie Sanders is anything but that.

Re: Bernie Sanders: "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear"

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN will flag and downvote anti AI sentiment. There is lots of it here, you just aren't allowed to see it.

I feel like we must be visiting different websites.

Have you seen how overwhelmingly anti-AI the non-software-engineering world is? (despite the hypocrisy as plenty use a chatbot these days) The resistance in here is pitiful.

I'm lurking in the indie game dev scene, and any mention of using LLMs for anything is downvoted and laughed at.

Re: Bernie Sanders: "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear"

#55

AI is probably in need of far more legal safeguards than we have now, but I am sort of tired of the "everyone will lose their jobs" narrative. There are so few jobs LLMs can fully automate. I think what will actually happen is that corporate CEOs will try to cut staff, it won't work, people will be rehired, and AI will largely make people's jobs easier and less labor-intensive.

The way this always works in a corporation is people's jobs will be just as hard or harder and they'll hire far less people. As always happens productivity per person will skyrocket and median wages will somehow be lower.

Re: Bernie Sanders: "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear"

#56

wow why are so many comments in this thread against Bernie's stance?

HN will flag and downvote anti AI sentiment. There is lots of it here, you just aren't allowed to see it.

I'm the one who posted this link, and I think Bernie Sanders is a terible man. But an op-ed by a U.S. Senator in the WSJ about a tech issue seems like proper HN material. It's been un-flagged by the mods.

Re: Bernie Sanders: "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear"

#57
post #52

AI is the best thing that happened to America in the last decade, and I dearly hope that politicians don't try to ruin it the way they're ruining other parts of the country. I respect some of Bernie's positions, but his stance on tech is dangerous.

AI is the best thing that happened for a relatively few number of privileged people, most of them being located in USA. This includes the programmers that may have benefited from using AI assistants.

AI has already stolen great amounts of money from a very large number of people all around the world, due to the huge increases in the prices of DRAM, SSDs and HDDs.

Moreover, there have already been a great number of layoffs, which truly or not have been blamed on AI. AI may have not been the true reason for those, but it certainly has provided a convenient justification.

There is no doubt that the number of people who have already been harmed by AI greatly exceeds the number of people who have benefited from AI.

There is no reason to believe that this trend will not continue.

When used in the right way, there is no doubt that LLMs and other ML/AI tools can ensure a significant progress, but from the recent history it seems almost certain that they will be more often used in the wrong way than in the right way, so most people will be negatively affected, not positively.

The problem is not AI itself, but the fact that AI is a tool controlled by extremely evil people, e.g. Sam Altman and Larry Ellison. It is very unlikely that this will change and this is the reason why AI will do more harm than good.

(There are a lot of examples that prove that individuals like those that I have named are truly evil, but I will just quote from TFA: "Larry Ellison predicts an AI-powered surveillance state in which “citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on”". Even only this is enough to prove that Ellison is an enemy.)

Re: Bernie Sanders: "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear"

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN will flag and downvote anti AI sentiment. There is lots of it here, you just aren't allowed to see it.

I'm the one who posted this link, and I think Bernie Sanders is a terible man. But an op-ed by a U.S. Senator in the WSJ about a tech issue seems like proper HN material. It's been un-flagged by the mods.

What are some of the terrible things he's done?

Re: Bernie Sanders: "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear"

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the one who posted this link, and I think Bernie Sanders is a terible man. But an op-ed by a U.S. Senator in the WSJ about a tech issue seems like proper HN material. It's been un-flagged by the mods.

What are some of the terrible things he's done?

That would be off-topic.

Re: Bernie Sanders: "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear"

#60
post #23

Few notes: The author uses polls that people are negative on AI, but people use it. All the time. And it's organic. Much like people started bringing Excel into the workplace and IT departments had to catch up, people are using personal AI and IT departments are freaking out. It's obvious that people find it useful (it's the fastest growing product in history). Why go off some polls that spread doomer nonsense? Billi…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN