The 'backlash' seems to be from the fact that people, esp white collar workers are finally realizing what blue collar folks have been feeling for quite some time. That an overwhelming majority of the technology driven productivity gains accrue to capital owners, not workers and AI is the ultimate productivity tool.
It doesn't help that capital owners no longer feel it necessary to even pretend. Like when CEOs openly salivate at the prospect of firing all workers and replacing them with AI. When people see their electricity rates go up to subsidize billionaires building AI data centers. When they see their real wages falling continually while they are told how good the economy is.
If the gains from AI were shared even a little with the regular people, they might not have the deep sense of unease and sometimes open hostility that we are seeing now.
"The regular people" …what??
I saw a series of ads in a train station the other day for some company claiming to offer "AI employees" that had slogans like "our employees never complain about overtime", "our employees don't ask about vacations", etc. and was just shocked at the brazenness of it.
The default rebuttal is that Human Resources is just a standard term. <= the point
What does this mean? Best I can come up with us "male/vemale"
AI is taking away and monopolizing the means of production, and making what few white collar workers remain rent their productivity. This is a completely different dynamic.
Additionally the AIs are trained on creations by many of those same regular people. They're not just seeing the profits funnelled upwards, some of those profits are being generated through their own works!
And before someone tries to argue "that's just how art etc. work" - sure, but the difference is quantity. If I get inspired by another artist, I can generate output at the speed of one artist. With current AI models, it's like a big company is training millions of artists on your style to pump out new pieces as fast as possible.
CEOs aren't stupid.
Some CEOs claim they are laying off people because AI has increased productivity and they don't need those people. But that's a lie. Not a straight lie, because lying to investors constitutes security fraud, but their language is carefully chosen so that the overall message is a lie, but they have plausible deniability.
Here's an example: Amazon fired 30000 workers, supposedly because of AI. And here's an excerpt from Nate Jones (prolific AI commentator, who worked for 5 years at Amazon) video [1]:
> Amazon fired 30,000 people because they needed the money today in order to buy GPUs to desperately try to secure a place in the future of AI cloud. That is the actual story. Now, that story does not sound as nice for Amazon as a future forward story about how we're automating with AI.
We’re on a slippery slope, because what happens when AI gets even better over the next 5 years? Robots took time to fully replace one person on an assembly line; it didn’t happen overnight.
Basic income seems more like a reality soon. Or you’re going to have slums and the wealthy.
> “Every time I use Codex to solve some issue late at night or GPT helps me figure out a difficult strategic problem, I feel: what a relief. There are so few minds on Earth that are both intelligent and persistent enough to generate new insights and keep the torch of scientific civilization alive. Now you have potentially infinite minds to throw at infinite potential problems. Your computer friend that never takes the day off, never gets bored, never checks out and stops trying.”
Um, this person needs help? Serious mental issues, hello?! It's really concerning me how many people are having breaks with reality, and I don't only mean the poor people who are sadly taking their own lives.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure that most media companies' main business now is creating problems that they can then report on. Whip up the crowd with fear and anxiety and then capitalize on it by feeding them a never ending stream of low key doom articles that they'll be compelled to read by their newfound neuroticism.
robby_w_g•1mo ago
gdulli•1mo ago
ares623•1mo ago
xg15•1mo ago
The bottom line of that talk seemed even worse: That for some tech leaders, the general wellbeing of the population or "classical" arguments for progress such as improving living conditions and advancing mutual understanding aren't even orthogonal to their goals but are explicit anti-goals: Because a world with too much wellbeing and too little conflict would ostensibly lead to stagnation, loss of freedom and innovation and the state of what Thiel termed the "Antichrist".
Too much conflict is bad as well because it carries the risk of complete destruction, so they'd aim for some kind of ideal level of conflict and suffering in the world, like some sort of twisted inflation target.
anal_reactor•1mo ago
> but aliens won't invade Earth
Native Americans thought the same.
fakedang•1mo ago
Insert Mr. Bean highway meme
cactacea•1mo ago
collingreen•1mo ago
What nonsense.
pjdemers•1mo ago
beAbU•1mo ago
I think it's absurd to justify killing one another in wars because it might one day save us from some hypothetical invasion.
anal_reactor•1mo ago
Not if we also develop technical abilities before the invasion. Here though you could make an argument that it would be much more effective if we cooperated instead of fighting.
> I think it's absurd to justify killing one another in wars because it might one day save us from some hypothetical invasion.
Well, the modern western moral system holds human life as the highest value. But even nowadays we still have moral systems that place the existence of a group much above the existence of an individual. Imagine that the whole humanity is like an organism - you don't really care about individual cells in your body, do you? A vaccination hurts, but ultimately, it leaves you stronger, right?
I'd say, "let's keep killing each other in wars so that we can maybe defend ourselves in a hypothetical alien invasion" is indeed absurd, but the general idea "wars allow humanity as a whole to practice self-defense" isn't. Europeans didn't die from native American diseases because millions of Europeans had already died in the past from similar diseases, building the collective immunity.
estimator7292•1mo ago
This isn't a case of who has the biggest gun. This is a case of someone has a gun that can wipe out your entire planet and you have a rock.
No, a planetary society cannot stop an invasion once they're in orbit. It simply is not possible, not with any technology we can even imagine.
You very much do not at all understand the argument you're making.
beAbU•1mo ago
Humans aren't cells. We are individual sentient beings.
anal_reactor•1mo ago
This is exactly what cancerous cells would say if they could.
Xerox9213•1mo ago
daymanstep•1mo ago