AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton • Hacker News Board

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#551

Post by lumirth » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 12:28 AM UTC

The thing that strikes me is that AI CEOs themselves make the claim that "AI will replace workers." Which seems a little nonsensical. Why would you say something like that, won't everyone hate you? After seeing some polls of the broader public's outlook on AI (can't remember where), it seem people do hate the C-suite for saying things like this. It's terrible marketing.

Here's the trick: it's not the public they're marketing to. It's other CEOs. As is often the case, consumers are either the product, or, best case, bystanders, and worst case, victims, of the machinations of the corporate world. May both sides of all of their pillows be warm. May their beds be filled with crumbs.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#552

Post by gaigalas » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 12:42 AM UTC

lumirth wrote: post #551

The thing that strikes me is that AI CEOs themselves make the claim that "AI will replace workers." Which seems a little nonsensical. Why would you say something like that, won't everyone hate you? After seeing some polls of the broader public's outlook on AI (can't remember where), it seem people do hate the C-suite for saying things like this. It's terrible marketing. Here's the trick: it's not the public they're m…

A powerful person that says nonsense with confidence is interpreted as having an elaborate plan.

This has been a trend over the last decade. I'm surprised most people don't understand it.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#553

Post by nubg » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

xprnio wrote: post #550

ndarray wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being rich is ultimately about owning and being able to defend resources. IF something like 99% of humans become irrelevant to the machine run utopia for the elites, whatever currency the poors use to pay for services among each other will be worthless to the top 1% when they simply don't need them or their services.

Would we just be splitting society in two in that case? Seeing as the poor would have nothing to give to the rich, nor the rich to the poor, wouldn’t the poor 99% just create their own new society with their own units of value?

Unless the poor cause global warming with their bonfires and that inconveniences the rich. In that case...they will kill the poor.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#554

Post by yourapostasy » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

dogleash wrote: post #522

hintymad wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might make the technology itself hit a ceiling because it's no longer being fed novel human problem-solving at scale. My read of the recent discussion is that people assume that the work of far fewer number of elites will define the patterns for the future. For instance, implementation of low-level networking code can be the combination of patterns of zeromq. The underlying assumption is that most people don't k…

>My read of the recent discussion is that people assume that the work of far fewer number of elites will define the patterns for the future. Even if we assume that's true, what will prevent atrophy of the skillset among the elites with such a small pool of practitioners?

Money and fame. Lots of money and fame.

There is no shortage of Olympic hopeful elite athletes every four years, despite the incredibly small pool of competitors at each Games.

Same for musicians.

This kind of Winner-Take-All Economics or Superstar Market is what capital wants in their ideal world in markets with near-zero marginal costs of distribution. Even if software creation in the long-term does not fall to this kind of labor market, LLM's can establish a "market can be irrational longer than you can stay solvent" dynamic where capital can run the labor market like this for software for a generation or three before having to face the reflexivity music, like they did for US manufacturing.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#555

Post by jychang » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 1:24 AM UTC

emp17344 wrote: post #465

jychang wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice LLM generated text. Now go read https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticit... or https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19382 to see why that text is outdated. Or read any paper in the entire field of mechanistic interpretability (from the past year or two), really. Hint: the first paper is titled "Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet" and you can ctrl-f for "We f…

Your entire argument is derived from a pseudoscientific field without any peer-reviewed research. Mechanistic interpretability is a joke invented by AI firms to sell chatbots.

Lol that's a stupid ass response, especially when half the papers are from universities from China. You think the chinese universities are trying to sell ChatGPT subscriptions? Ridiculous. You're just falling behind in tech knowledge.

And apparently you think peer reviewed papers presented at NeurIPS or other conferences are considered pseudoscience. (For the people not versed in ML, NeurIPS is where the 2017 paper "Attention is All You Need" that started the modern ML revolution was presented)

https://neurips.cc/virtual/2023/poster/72666

https://jmlr.org/beta/papers/v26/23-0058.html

https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/palumbo25a.html

https://iclr.cc/virtual/2026/poster/10011755

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#556

Post by AngryData » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 1:31 AM UTC

xprnio wrote: post #550

ndarray wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being rich is ultimately about owning and being able to defend resources. IF something like 99% of humans become irrelevant to the machine run utopia for the elites, whatever currency the poors use to pay for services among each other will be worthless to the top 1% when they simply don't need them or their services.

Would we just be splitting society in two in that case? Seeing as the poor would have nothing to give to the rich, nor the rich to the poor, wouldn’t the poor 99% just create their own new society with their own units of value?

Or the poor decide the rich have no more right to be rich than themselves and start burning and destroying rich people's stuff and anger turns to blood.

It is far easier and faster to destroy than to build and technology can only protect you so much. Unless someone manages a completely self contained enviroment and has a good enough place to hide with it they could be at risk.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#557

Post by jychang » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 1:31 AM UTC

dns_snek wrote: post #406

jychang wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think nobody understands what's happening in these models Quick question, do you know what "Mechanistic Interpretability Researcher" means? Because that would be a fairly bold statement if you were aware of that. Try skimming through this first: https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/NfFST5Mio7BCAQHPA/an-ex... > On the macro level, everyone can see simple logical flaws. Your argument applies to humans as well. Or a…

> do you know what "Mechanistic Interpretability Researcher" means? Because that would be a fairly bold statement if you were aware of that. The mere existence of a research field is not proof of anything except "some people are interested in this". Its certainly doesn't imply that anyone truly understands how LLMs process information, "think", or "reason". As with all research, people have questions, ideas, theories…

That's a lame typical anti-intellectual argument. You might as well as say all of physics is worthless because nobody truly understands gravity.

Notice I didn't use vague terms like "think" or "reason" and instead used specific terms like "feature/circuit internal representation". You're trying to make a false equivalence of "the hard problem of gravity/reasoning/etc is not solved ... so therefore nobody understands anything" and that's obviously a false leap of logic if you've talked to any physicist or ML researcher or whatever.

That type of response is more typical GED holder who wants to feel intellectually superior so they pull out a "well you don't know anything either" to a scientist.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#558

Post by jychang » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 1:55 AM UTC

mrbungie wrote: post #370

jychang wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also literally factually incorrect. Pretty much the entire field of mechanistic interpretability would obviously point out that models have an internal definition of what a bug is. Here's the most approachable paper that shows a real model (Claude 3 Sonnet) clearly having an internal representation of bugs in code: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticit... Read the entire section around thi…

Was this "paper" eventually peer reviewed? PS: I know it is interesting and I don't doubt Antrophic, but for me it is so fascinating they get such a pass in science.

This is more of an article describing their methodology than a full paper. But yes, there's plenty of peer reviewed papers on this topic, scaling sparse autoencoders to produce interpretable features for large models.

There's a ton of peer reviewed papers on SAEs in the past 2 years; some of them are presented at conferences.

For example: "Sparse Autoencoders Find Highly Interpretable Features in Language Models" https://proceedings.iclr.cc/paper_files/paper/2024/file/1fa1...

"Scaling and evaluating sparse autoencoders" https://iclr.cc/virtual/2025/poster/28040

"Identifying Functionally Important Features with End-to-End Sparse Dictionary Learning" https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2024/hash/c...

"Gemma Scope: Open Sparse Autoencoders Everywhere All At Once on Gemma 2" https://aclanthology.org/2024.blackboxnlp-1.19.pdf

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#559

Post by weird-eye-issue » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 2:06 AM UTC

Tade0 wrote: post #381

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean the content of your clipboard?

I either accidentally pasted it somewhere and removed, forgetting about doing that or it's reading the clipboard. The suggestion it gave me started with the contents of the clipboard and expanded to scenario A.

So you don't even know what your prompt was and you think it might be secretly reading your clipboard and you expect people to take you seriously?

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#560

Post by ndarray » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 3:04 AM UTC

AngryData wrote: post #556

xprnio wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would we just be splitting society in two in that case? Seeing as the poor would have nothing to give to the rich, nor the rich to the poor, wouldn’t the poor 99% just create their own new society with their own units of value?

Or the poor decide the rich have no more right to be rich than themselves and start burning and destroying rich people's stuff and anger turns to blood. It is far easier and faster to destroy than to build and technology can only protect you so much. Unless someone manages a completely self contained enviroment and has a good enough place to hide with it they could be at risk.

That's where "being able to defend your resources" comes in, otherwise they're not rich. But yes, I'm implying that in the future the defense could be done by something like armed drones. And "defense" would mean enforcement of whatever draconian laws they cook up. When the executive branch is non-human, you can never have a mutiny. You simply don't need to do any convincing or any pretending that you're a good guy. All you need is to outproduce the humans, make more drones than they can put up resistance. And drones are cheap, even today, and would only be one piece of the equation anyway, among direct access to your bank account, real-time AI surveillance for minute missteps, crowd control weapons mounted to autonomous vehicles,... all in all pretty grim. The question is who gets to be the elite. It's not obvious that it should be the Silicon Valley guys. We'll surely have massive elite wars (fought by humans + AI), sold to us as civil/national wars and people's revolutions, before the above pans out. The partial release of the Epstein files is one cluster of the elite (around Trump) threatening another. I'd wager that a lot of dirt will see the light of day in the next ten years and underneath it will be the fight over who gets to command the new kingmaker tech.