I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now.

Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob. Trying to stand up for your right to a safe public space brands you as evil.

There's no room for a middle ground or nuance anymore. You are either entirely in one tribe, or entirely out.

Are you having these conversations about politics in person? Or are these conversations happening on Twitter/Reddit/HN/whatever?

In my experience, online forums don't really work for political discussion for a bunch of reasons.

If you change to getting your fix of politics from long-form articles and radio-style scripted podcasts by professional journalists, you'll probably find there's a lot more room for nuance.

I can't speak for the other poster but I've had the experience they described in-person, when I was living in Victoria

I rented an apartment downtown Victoria and had pretty frequent run-ins with addicts on the streets. My friends who lived and worked further out away from the downtown core had very strong opinions about it any time I had anything negative to say about the experiences

As a counter point, I have more nuanced conversations in person and am able to do it online; however I have also moderated a community for several years and learned how to do it.

From what I can remember of research, is that there is a difference in how people express themselves online vs offline.

In the real world I still encounter more moderation than not except from people who spend a lot of time on TikTok.

This is such a wild thing to bring up unprompted.

I grew up in a small village, 300 people. There you learn to accept your neighbor political rant, otherwise you're socialy dead and that's a pretty bad place to be. I learned to dissociate the person from its opinions.

I'm living now in the city, where you don't need to listen to your neighbor because you can find a more fitting social circle. People are not able to listen and compromise, they'll just turn around and ignore you once they understand you are not on their side.

I was explaining this to a woman who was going to move in a village, and she said "how can you be friend with a person from the other end politicaly?".

It's a strange situation where the far right rural nut job are more open minded than city dwellers.

I mean it's a bit difficult to be open minded to someone that would gladly have you killed.

how can you be open minded and avoid being stuck in a bubble if you can't be friends with someone like that?

If you lose the fear of being called “far-right,” you will find all the missing shades of gray: people who like AI but are also worried about its effects on society, or those who are angry about the burden of data centers on their city but don’t believe AI is “burning the planet.”

A question I find myself selfishly asking a lot is: why do I have to be the one who is accepting or tolerant of others when they may not be accepting of me or my friends and family? I should speak respectfully of rural areas and their inhabitants but cities are free game to be portrayed as dens of crime, drugs, filth, and illegal immigrants? I should respect evangelical Christian communities but my transgender friends can't enjoy the same rights, benefits, and protections of society as cisgender/heterosexual people anywhere they go in the US? To make it explicitly political, Democrats are being asked to moderate and not be so intolerant but no such demands seem to be being made of Republicans or their voters.

What you’re describing is religion applied to every opinion.

Ok so you’re not denying the impact on climate change. Any of the other negative impacts it has on society?

Don’t sweep them under the rug and say, “works for me though so that’s worth it, not a big deal.”

I think the maths is interesting and the research is fascinating. I like computers, programming, and theoretical computer science more perhaps than the average person. That doesn’t mean I’m happy with data centres relying on illegal methane power plants to generate their base load power requirements. I think it’s unethical… and illegal. It seems like regulators are either unable to keep up or are getting paid to not look. That’s unethical. The financial systems used to deploy these data centres are imploding in debt and should also be regulated. They’re going to poison a bunch of retirement funds and could be a major factor in the crash of US bonds. Unethical. If they can’t run a profitable business even when they are bending and cheating and causing all of this harm I don’t think there’s any reason they shouldn’t be left to crash and burn like anyone else.

I don’t have much sympathy for the position of, “yeah that stuff is bad but I like it anyway and don’t want to talk about it.”

You might find more common ground with people if you can recognize the harms it does do, acknowledge that they are bad and advocate for change.

And you might have to give up the idea that any of this technology is going to lead to the creation of science-fiction super intelligent beings. We know what the combination of attention, transformers, and RNN can do. Pretty nifty stuff… but is it worth bleeding an economy of all its resources so that you can simulate f within psi worth it? I don’t think so. Sometimes the answer is, yeah neat but who cares? I’d rather have energy for keeping my cooling on in the middle of this heat wave.

I agree that there are some harms, but they are mostly self imposed. If a retirement fund gambles people's money on the wrong company, that is on them.

Most of the power conflicts are downstream of corrupt politicians and ignorant voters strangling their grid and stymieing efforts to improve production and transmission.

Not just computers, but documents! It's amazing to be able to paste in a few RFCs and then interrogate the documents to get a better understanding of them.

It is truly an amazing time we live in. I get the worries and fear too, but it is still amazing.

The AI you read of as a child (speaking for myself, coming from a lot of 80s sci-fi stories) is not all good of course; that's where most of the plot's conflict comes from. But LLMs, for a lot of people, are more burdened with the downsides sci-fi stories warned us about with very little, if any, of the advantages.

And speaking of forests for the trees, you zoom out a bit more and see that this AI hype train is following a years-long trend of SV being exposed for its moral failings. We have repeatedly shown, as an industry, that we missed the point of the literature we so love to quote. From the concept of "meritocracy" to naming a company "Palantir". The AI hype is not an isolated incident. We love to quote Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park but it's all rhetoric---we don't really ask ourselves that question!

Even if not, interesting AIs were at least interesting characters in a story sense (e.g. C3P0).

Now we're dealing with effectively the opposite - something that looks and behaves like a person but is decidedly not one. If you grew up with all the scifi about sympathetic (or at least charismatic) AI characters, this is probably sobering.

Depends on which sci-fi and/or literature you've been reading, I suppose?

Plenty written on these subjects where the future does not turn into some techno-utopia. And I've always found these takes on the subject much more compatible with the human condition as I've personally observed it in practice.

conversational interfaces we've had for decades. In fact this goes so far back that people thought ELIZA was sentient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect), and not just laypersons but even the people working on it.

The actual lesson from this stuff is that linguistic interfaces fry people's brains, you could convince nerds that a brick was intelligent if you hooked it up to the voice of Scarlett Johansson. The perception that these systems are in any meaningful way intelligent, when they start getting stuck in a doom loop of fixing the same two bugs by reintroducing them in circles or give entire reviews for a music album that doesn't actually exist, is entirely in the head of the user.

It's annoying in my context but it's no wonder people jumping into open ended "conversations" with these things and up in dangerous feedback loops

Delusion.

I dont understand why the old definition of AI keeps being retconned.

Intelligence is usually defined as the skill in pursuing a goal, or speed of acquiring the ability for pursuing given goal. Given the goal-dependent nature, it's not that useful to use the same tests and measurements for intelligence over time, be it artificial or not.

[1] Legg, S., Hutter, M.: A collection of definitions of intelligence

[2] François Chollet, On the Measure of Intelligence

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 option is being part owner of a world conquering, game changing tech - or a victim - which would you choose?

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 towards.

I'm not sure why we allowed it, but they have been working on it for more than 50 years. My best guess is that they just kept insisting on it until people lost attention for an instant, and then did it again, and again.

UK an Germany practically invented the concept, and the US practically wrote the manual on how to make a welfare state.

Imagine if we had social media during the flip from geocentrism.

There was never any old definition AI that limited it to such a tiny set of capabilities.

AI is controversial because the term intelligent is controversial and covers so much.

The term "AI" never meant bots in general.

It's true that in games bots were also called AI but only in a specific context and niche, and it is not what the whole conversation is about.

It's just the mimicry thereof. I probably fall into the "pro-AI" camp if we want to divide things along the binary, but it's pretty facile to consider this software to possess or represent "intelligence" IMO.

I agree with that, but I don't think anyone is moving the goalposts as you imply later in your post.

Machine learning wasn't unheard of 20 years ago, and statistical text engines were hitting consumer use (iPhone autocomplete probably what 2008-2010?)

It’s not general intelligence, but it’s a system that’s able to produce novel outputs from its inputs in pursuit of a goal. The fact that the goal is always externally-provided is more related to consciousness than intelligence.

Search algorithms used to be considered a part of AI research. The whole point of the field, from the Turing test onward, has been that mimicry is in some sense all you need. Maybe there's a coherent philosophical position where intelligence is defined as some intrinsic property possessed by conscious agents, but I find it remarkably hard to come up with a precise definition along those lines.

Replace "AI" in that sentence with any rapidly evolving tech: social networks, smart homes, digital governments, hell - even online shopping.

The versions of any of those things a child would've read 20 years ago won't have anywhere near the complexities and unexpected downsides all those things ended up having in real life.

20 years ago, AI to (kid) me was a real life C3PO, or an npc in an open-world game that existed in that world with their own motivation and story independent of what you did. Or the stereotypical humanoid robot with consciousness like in the film "A.I.". No kid could've imagined vibe coding, running sub-agents, diffusion models, AI zombies, and all this other stuff we have today. Everything you imagined as a child is still possible, and depending on what exactly you read, is already here.

Yeah the UX is different than what anyone 20 years ago would've predicted, but how does this mean the "hate" make sense? That's not even 0.1% of the reason the typical anti-AI people are against AI.

We don’t get Star Trek post-scarcity by forcing everyone to do less, only by doing more. Creating more technology and creating (and consuming) more energy. Much more, near infinite amounts of it, that is what the replicator needs to create mass from energy.

I'm sorry but anyone who looks at Star Trek as a serious model for anything is at best naive. It's a space fantasy show whose Luxury Space Communism is little more than set dressing because it's a capitalist enterprise (pun intended come at me petaQs) made by capitalists for capitalist ends.

Likewise, expecting LLMs to serve anti-capitalist ends (eliminating the need for jobs among anyone but the capitalist class) when they are entirely controlled by capitalists is naive.

* according to the canon set by Gene Roddenberry. What actually plays out in the franchise is different, because human conflict makes for better entertainment.

Practically no one starves. The murder rate is down by crazy numbers. I'm not sure how much of a problem racism was at that time, but you wouldn't have had many chances to meet people from different haplogroups in any case.

The abundance created by industrial society is not distributed "evenly" or "fairly" but the baseline shift is insane.

What period of history would you want your children to be born into, with zero control over where or who they’d be born to? Just a random person on the earth on a date you choose, what would be your choice?

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.

The analogy wasn't the best, but the whole of tech isn't on the hook for this. Just like a typical daily driver who works on their own car can't be directly responsible for the climate crisis. There are major players making the decisions that are causing the state we're in.

I’m (and presumably many of us are) feeling the destabilizing effects of my industry now in a similar way to how many other professions have felt its effects before. Given our industry’s impact on society, it’s important that we feel this effect directly, so that we can do a better job of empathizing with the industries we’re “disrupting.” Whether or not I have personally participated in those aspects of the industry, I share inescapably in its overall karma, which is why it’s important to not just opt out of the parts of it I feel are immoral, but try to push for it to be better where I can.

This isn't a nit. It changes the way you have to look at this. You can't say "we need to better feel the impacts IT has on the broader workforce, therefore I should avoid working on things that automate jobs away". So long as you take anything resembling a market salary anywhere, you're supplying labor to the system that does that.

Your options therefore are:

* Adopt an ethical stance that doesn't intrinsically penalize work that increases global productivity and thus exerts downward pressure on labor.

* Do work that somehow works against that pressure, for instance by donating 20-40% of your compensation to labor causes, or something like that.

* Leave the industry.

I don't look at this quandry and see an ethical imperative; I look at it and see a broken ethical calculation. From that observation, I get to: "I should shut up about things that impact employment for software developers, because there's nothing intrinsically bad about that."

(Whether or not developers, or dockworkers, come out on net positive or negative is a separable question.)

The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living (and many of us still do so) -- we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training.

This is precisely the karma that is coming to us as a group. Because of this sort of stuff.

No, a 50 year old trade worker cannot "trade up" in any realistic sense. That's idiotic on it's face. And that also ignores that many folks don't want to trade up because they get satisfaction in what they do - just like some tech workers do. Man of those folks also had moral and ethical reasons to not want to join an industry assisting in putting their friends and family out of work.

> The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living

AKA automating other jobs away in many (perhaps most?) cases. Either directly or indirectly. These line-of-business applications tend to be automation of some sort which reduces manual labor. Be it on the factory floor, enabling that factory to be outsourced to China, or just making "paperwork" more efficient putting an office full of secretaries out of a job. Or working in some ad-tech enabled field which put entire industries out of work altogether.

> we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training.

Factory workers, skilled machinists, tool and die manufacturers, secretaries, accountants, journalists - effectively an infinite list - did not contribute to the IT over the past 30 years that replaced them either. That's the point being made in this sub-thread.

But hey, you could always pivot your career to be a plumber, roofer, or electrician! While I'm certainly going to be part of the targeted group, I can't really say I'll be surprised at the working class laughing at us and enjoying IT folks getting their comeuppance.

I haven't found a way to articulate my thoughts very well on this subject, others do it better even on HN. But coming from a working class family with most of my old school friends from growing up still working blue collar jobs - I can say it's been incredibly uncomfortable listening to the narratives from tech workers on these subjects for 25 years. It's been utterly amazing to me how people switched on a dime within a couple years on the subject now that their livelihoods are on the line. The calls for free markets, pro-automation, "just learn to code", anti-regulation, etc. all instantly changed the moment such folks had even a trivial amount of similar pressure put on them.

I've never worked on software that automated someone's job away. But because I'm a programmer at all, it's partially my fault?

I'm not saying you personally set out to take anyone's job away. But our field is unusually well compensated because of its function in the broader marketplace. The point is that moralisms like "fault" don't operate here.

I think this would be very difficult to do as a web-dev. The web itself is a form of global scale automation in-itself.

I am also a self-taught tech nerd. I have not "directly" worked on any specific automation project in terms of "come put this group out of work" - but I can't think of a single project I worked on that wasn't making current processes more efficient and automated - by largely removing remaining manual steps involved. This is why we exist to begin with, otherwise no one would be paying us to do the work.

I wrote software that took server provisioning from a process that involved a tech typing on a keyboard every time, to clicking a button on a webUI to install an OS. A task many here at HN have done just for their home lab environment so as to make their own lives more efficient.

This put zero people out of work. But it probably prevented hiring of at last a handful of low-level technicians over the course of that software's lifecycle. Which is the same thing to an industry at large.

Even stuff as simple as writing code to put up a new post on a company website is contributing towards automating someone's job away.

I have often stated computers are the ultimate robot. They fit in nearly every industry to automate things and make processes more efficient. These are code words for "less human labor needed" - aka less jobs.

I recently used AI to make me a custom song for a silly thing. It put no one out of work and I'd not hire someone to make such a thing. But the fact the tech exists to enable such a thing means its absolutely putting musicians out of work. My trivial usage of the technology is part of what enables it to exist at all and put others out of work. Those devs probably point to things I use it for to pretend it doesn't impact anyone negatively. But what I did with it makes using it for stuff like a 30s advertising jingle even more trivial.

My very first web-dev work in the late 90's to enable a pet store to sell their wares on-line absolutely put folks out of work, even though I could have easily seen it as it enabling a small company to do something they could not have done before.

Same goes for my first "real job" where I was debugging Java Applets for an expense management company. This was in direct competition with the existing industry that did it via paper receipts and phone calls. It put massive numbers of folks out of work if you zoom out to the larger industry, while also enabling many other folks to do things they never could haven even thought to do before.

There are extremely small use-cases along the margins where you won't be using technology that directly competes with an existing industry, I can certainly imagine them but you'd have to go extremely out of your way to ensure you are only in these spaces. I will certainly admit it is unlikely but possible to find a way to make a living in these edge cases while still working within the IT space.

As a hobby? Sure. Easy. Making a living as a web-dev at it over a longtime career? I do find it very difficult to imagine - since that's where the money comes from to pay overhead such as IT folks and programmers.

As an industry ? IT (and especially web tech over the past 30 years) exists to make things more efficient and put entire categories of folks out of work.

Retail investors largely didn't exist. Digital retail trading platforms greatly expanded the pool of retail traders, which actually increases the demand for brokers (as in, people trained for the purpose of facilitating financial transactions). Nobody using Robinhood would have hired a broker. Now, thousands of such people work servicing their accounts.

I have no love to for finance industry, much less fintech; i would accept practically any argument that the finance sector as a whole, or retail trading as an idea, is a bad thing for working class people. But i don't see how creating a whole new market for people that didn't previously exist, and which increases overall demand for the specific specialized labor in question, has removed jobs from the pool in aggregate.

I don't think this applies for example with "well former shop clerks are now Amazon delivery drivers" -- that may well be true (or less than true) but still materially worse for everyone involved, etc.

I just don't accept, as axiom, that every every single technology has had an exclusively negative effect on overall employment prospects.

For clarity, I'm very much a socialist, i have no issue with the idea fundamentally that technology in the hands of capitalists is detrimental to the working class writ large in basically all cases. I just take umbrage with the assumption that it's impossible to work in tech without facilitating such things. Much of my work, I'm happy to say, has been about helping people do their jobs better; it hasn't been directed at making them do more in less time, reduce headcount, or some abstract efficiency. It's been to help people do the jobs they already have to do, more effectively. A job a person still has to do, but can be done less stressfully with help from technology.

I wish every thing I've ever touched was such, admittedly it isn't. But i think there's lots of places where that might still be true: aircraft engineers? Pilots? (Fewer trains i guess but that's mostly a US phenomenon). There are administrative jobs working systems that couldn't exist without "automation" as in they would not have existed before the computer created the system.

Idk. I can be swayed, i just get sick of this implication that people working for a living have influence over their employers. They don't, by design, except for managers maybe (but I'm not and never will be one of those, either)

[1] https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik...

> But it seems the online encyclopedia is not completely immune to broader trends, with human page views falling 8% year-over-year,

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/18/wikipedia-says-traffic-is-...

This is actually a big part of why being pro-AI is met with negativity today.

As someone who's using and building with AI and also experiences the "anti" movement, you've chosen a pretty condescending minority of the reasons why they dislike AI and painted it as the default.

"They never liked AI because they don't like the idea maybe they're not such special snowflakes in the universe"... really?

They didn't "always hate AI". Most people didn't even think of AI outside of niche things like self-driving. Instead their hatred is from LLMs and generative AI which (as far as they're concerned) didn't exist until November 30, 2022.

Actual reasons they readily share for not liking it are things like:

- it was built by abusing copyright (true with nuance)

- it's used to generate massive amounts of low value content that's overwhelming their spaces (very true)

- it's having an environmental impact (true with more nuance)

- it's making the things they want to buy more expensive (true, even things unrelated to AI)

- the loudest voices in the room have spent years telling them this could destroy humanity and/or take all their jobs (completely true)

- it's behind major layoffs (true with nuance around stated reasons vs actual)

- people who are pro-AI have a strong tendency to minimize their reasons for hating it (... obviously true)

I mean even if you like AI, it's clear we're at a place with so many reasons for people to be anti-AI that it's honestly an own goal at this point.

People didn't have opinions about generative AI as it exists today 20 years ago. The idea of a computer being able to turn any topic into a haiku would have been contentious for if it was possible, not if it was good: that sounds great!

But now we got it and it came with way more baggage than any of them ever imagined. They didn't think it'd learn to write haikus by ripping through every written word. And they didn't think it'd be used to write lots of spam instead of haikus once it could. And they didn't think the same capability would generalize to typing in an artist's name and spitting out infinitely remixed copies of their work.

-

I think moving forward in a less negative direction starts with being real about why people hate AI, and it's a lot less "it makes me feel less special" than it is "it's actively reducing my quality of life" for people outside of the bubble.

I should say I do think that deeper ontological thing is why people tend to think the tech will always be a novelty or will stagnate soon, etc.

I wish the Dems could have this conversation about their policies and messaging!

Luddites, the whole of them.

derac: "But sir, I think that Von Braun guy is doing some pretty cool stuff with tech. I think we should just let the Nazis keep doing what they're doing; unimpeded."

Truman: "What the hell is wrong with you?"

derac: "Guahh! It'S LiKE yOu aReN'T AllOwED tO hAvE a PosITivE oR NuAncED OpiNiOn oF ThE TeCH!"

I have been too, but LLMs aint it, just like mobile phones is not subspace communicator...

Online if people even smell something they don’t like… it goes bad fast.

Noticed how the proponents of AI are the Musk, Thiel, Palantir, and other, who have wet dreams about authoritarianism, control, and subjuging minorities?

Don't you think there's a reason for this?

Very strange, but I’ve seen the same folks dog pile in for other causes, so I guess it’s just a part of the identity now.