maciejzj

I would say that we have now enough information to say that this sentiment (characteristic for some strata of american society) is simply not true:

1) Wealthy people account for more and more % of consumption (now about 50% in the US). Source by Federal Reserve via Bloomberg: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/capital-markets/top-10-of-earn....

2) "Investment in productive companies" now either goes to:

  a) financial instruments that exist for pure wealth extraction/multiplication in form of being a landlord, private equity, REITS, etc.

  c) stock market which is eaten by AI-adjacent companies which primary incentive is job displacement.

Neither of these seem to bring any >actual< benefit to the society in terms of living standards, health, food quality, personal independence, psychological well-being, stability, etc.

The idea that wealthy make decision beneficial to wider audience is as outdated as trickle-down economics. Both are false.

I don't think that bots have taken over HN. I meant that the frontier of the tech research brags about their recklessness here and the rest of us have become bystanders to this process. Gives me goosebumps.

Yeah, I am familiar with these works of art and probably most people are. However, they were mostly speculative. Now we are facing some of their premises in the real world. And the guys who push the technology in a reckless way seem to notice this, but just nod their heads and carry on.

At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.

Yeah, I agree with what you said. It's not about the absolute number of people, but the social unrest. If you look at how poor we did our job at redistribution of wealth so far, I find it hard to believe that we will do well in the future. I am afraid of mass pauperisation and immiseration of societies followed by violence.

I would say that it is bad when it has large derivative (positive or negative). However, the problem is not about >number of human beings< but about making agency that existing people have obsolete.

We don't know what the author had in mind, but one has to really be tone deaf to let the weirdness of the discussion go unnoticed. Take a look at the last paragraphs in the text again:

> And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared.

> I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did.

> But looking at how fast Claude is automating my job, I think we're getting a lot less.

While most of the text is written from cold economic(ish) standpoint it is really hard not to get bleak impression from it. And the last three sentences express that in vague way too. Some ambiguity is left on purpose so you can interpret the daunting impression your way.

The article presents you with crushing juxtaposition, implicates insane dangers, and leaves you with the feeling of inevitability. Then back to work, I guess.

I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently, but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to human population? And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather from perspective of some kind of economic determinism? Have you ever thought that you would be compared to a gasoline engine and everyone would discuss this juxtaposition from purely economic perspective? And barely anyone shares a thought like "technology should be warranted by the populace, not the other way around?". And the guy writing this works at Anthropic? The very guy who makes this thing happen, but is only able to conclude this with "I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did". What the hell.

I think that AI capabilities are now really impressive, nevertheless my point is not about it being “cool” it is, but rather what kind of society we are going to produce with it and how it impacts people’s lives.

> It used to rightfully be something we looked forward to

This is rather unimportant, but I would say that media has usually portrayed AI as a dangerous thing. Space oddysey, Terminator, Mass Effect, Her, Alien, Matrix, Ex Machina, you name it.

I believe that the root cause for the "fatigue" and tension around AI is much more embedded in the societal context.

US (and the rest of the western world) citizens face real life problems in youth employment, social/political instability, unaffordable housing, internet addiction (yes, I believe that it is real problem that people spend 5 hours on their phones daily) and social atomisation. Meanwhile all resources are put in a rush into building technology that does not fundamentally improve people's well being. Advanced societies have had pretty good capabilities of doing writing, design, coding, searching information, etc. Now we are pouring all available resources, at any cost, to automate these processes even more. The costs of this operation are tremendous and it doesn't yield any results that improve everyday lives.

In 2020 there was a ton of UI/UX/graphics companies that could produce copious amount of visual content for the society while providing work to many people. Now we are about to automate this process and be able to generate infinite amount of graphics on demand. To what end? Were our capabilities to create graphics any kind of bottleneck before? I don't think so.

The stock market and tech leadership are completely decoupled from the problems that the majority of people faces. The real effect of AI at hand is to commoditise intellectual work that previously functioned well dispersed in society. This does not bring benefit to the majority of people.

This is truly heartbreaking, programming was the last profession beside medicine doctor that guaranteed young people good start in life in my country.

It is insane how much screwed over we are. I am about to turn 30 soon with 5 YoE, PhD in ML which supposedly is the cutting edge stuff. Yet I have no prospects to even buy a tiny flat and start “normal life”. AI eats its own tail, I have no idea what I should do and what to learn to have any sensible prospects in life.

On a side note, has anyone noticed the disparity of attitude and level of intensity of dialogue when it comes to AI in different HN posts?

Given that there are many threads where 80% act as if AI would cause second coming I suspected that main topic of discussion here would be "is it worth learning CS at all in 2026?". To my (pleasant) surprise the discussion here is much more "normal". Does anyone suspect that some HN posts have a lot of astroturfing from AI-adjacent organisations?