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.
No, my job is already highly LLM assisted and I just have more work to do. Because now I can tackle things on the backlog we thought could never be prioritized.
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.
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 certainly powerful, but despite tech CEO whitewashing, none of them are planning for how the economy will recover from a potential devastation of white collar jobs. Token bills fund rich investors & executives, not everyday Americans.
For AI to give me abundant free time & happiness, I need to have money, and I don’t see UBI anywhere on OpenAI’s roadmap.
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.)
In Canada, demands are not actually demands. That way if the demand is avoided, there never was a demand to begin with; however, if it was fulfilled, then of course there was always a demand all along.
It's extremely prevalent in Canada as well; almost certainly even more so. It's really a North American thing.
I expect copious downvotes with no actual replies. Then the comment will be flagged by the bot armies so the administration here can preserve its dearly held national identity of being "diverse" while never having elected an ethnic minority PM.
I would expect more downvotes for your needless "I'm going to get downvoted because the sheep hate when wolves tell the truth!" persecution complex. Your comment was at least mildly interesting before you got to that.
I posted Bernie's "Conversation with Claude" a while back, and it was just about immediately taken down.
Let's face it Y combinator is mostly AI startups for the next few years, and any anti-AI sentiment is going to hurt the bottom line.
That being said, I disagree with Sanders on a number of points. He wants to stop data center construction. Can't think of a more luddite un-nuanced solution to the "problem"
The real AI danger is not the threat to white collar jobs (which will simply have to evolve), but something we will see roughly 18 months now when Joe Schmo asks Claude Giga Max Supreme 8.0 to help him reduce his taxes, and it hacks into the IRS and deletes everyone's records.
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.
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.
I've heard this brought up many times but I don't really understand the implications of it. I can't really think of a system of government which hasn't killed large numbers of people. Even the USA's early wars like the civil war have death tolls >500k. We also lose ~7k homeless people every year.
Removing the contexts of those deaths makes it very difficult to evaluate the true causes and if the political ideology is to blame or if the centralization of power common across all governments leads to deaths.
He honeymooned in USSR. Which is a rather odd place to honeymoon in 1988. But yes, he never explicitly said he was a communist, but just someone that wants to seize the means of production.
The grocery store thing is a red herring, although its supported by nyc who by your logic is a communist? Thats hardly a definitive test. There are more relevant industries
In a 1976 interview, Sanders said, “I favor the public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries,” and when told that sounded like socialism, he replied, “Of course.”
“public ownership of the major means of production and their conversion into worker-controlled enterprises.”
More recently, Sanders has also been described as backing worker ownership plans, with reporting that he was encouraging workers to take control of the means of production.
My god dude. This is an opinion piece from the New York Post, which is a truly bottom of the barrel rag. Why are you posting this? You can plainly see how hard they are stretching the truth here. An actual anti-communist Republican already explained how stupid this article is [1].
They call the United Packinghouse Workers Union a communist organization, which is a flat out lie. The UPWA was a mainstream CIO (later AFL-CIO) union. It wasn't even among the unions the CIO purged in 1949 for being communist-led. By the time Bernie was involved in 1964, the union had formally banned communists from holding office under the AFL-CIO Ethical Practices Code, and Martin Luther King Jr. literally sat on the commission overseeing that compliance. The union is famous historically for its civil rights work, not for being a communist front.
They said Eugene Debs was "arrested for espionage" which is a lie. He was arrested for being critical of the Wilson administration. It was under the "Espionage act," but it was not espionage, just good old-fashioned arresting people for speaking their mind. They neglect to mention Debs refused to join the Communist party when they split off from the Socialist party.
They implied the Young People’s Socialist League was a communist organization, when it was extremely anti-communist.
They said the "American People’s History Society" was an organ for Marxist propaganda, but there's absolutely nothing to suggest that. They are implying this organization had a long history of spreading communist propaganda and that the Eugene Debs film is further evidence of that. But that's not the case. They just made a Eugene Debs film, which by itself, doesn't really rise to the level of Marxist Propaganda. He was a socialist, and an important figure in American History. Or is American History just supposed to cover the Carnegies of the world?
It's funny to watch people pearl clutch over a politician championing workers rights because it might overlap slightly with the politics of a distant revolution while we have a sitting President that kills citizens, bombs children's hospitals, jails journalists, and publicly salivates over the idea of inflicting retribution on anyone left of the alt-right. This is concern trolling at it's finest.
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 individuals and companies. So he’s not wrong.
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.
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?
Billionaires investing money in creating products that nearly a billion people use rather than improving the lives of working families? Are the billionaires elected leaders? Why is that burden on them. The government gets trillions every year, yet try to get people to believe they are just a few billion shy of providing medicare for all and free childcare. Give me a break
AI will create a police state? We've had cameras pretty much everywhere for decades, yet somehow unsolved killings reach a record high in 2023. We don't even bother locking up the people that get arrested. The number of prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%
No one's buying it from these politicians anymore. You're in politics, you have trillions to spend. Just get your shit together, actually help people and stop with these hysterics.
I think flagging an op-ed by a sitting Senator that appeared in the WSJ is an abuse of the flagging system. I don’t like Bernie at all, but I thought it was a very relevant item to post.
The AI companies, obviously.
They use government puppets to create regulation that put competitors out of business under the guide of "child safety" and "threat to everything you hold dear".
Bootleggers and Baptists is a concept put forth by regulatory economist Bruce Yandle, derived from the observation that regulations are supported both by groups that want the ostensible purpose of the regulation, and by groups that profit from undermining that purpose.
It takes a special, uniquely American type of politician to look at a war in Iran and conclude that domestic AI policy is the real threat to American people.
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.
No, my job is already highly LLM assisted and I just have more work to do. Because now I can tackle things on the backlog we thought could never be prioritized.
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.
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.
To America as a whole? How?
AI is certainly powerful, but despite tech CEO whitewashing, none of them are planning for how the economy will recover from a potential devastation of white collar jobs. Token bills fund rich investors & executives, not everyday Americans.
For AI to give me abundant free time & happiness, I need to have money, and I don’t see UBI anywhere on OpenAI’s roadmap.
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.)
What do the American people hold dear?
Pathological demand avoidance.
In Canada, demands are not actually demands. That way if the demand is avoided, there never was a demand to begin with; however, if it was fulfilled, then of course there was always a demand all along.
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It's extremely prevalent in Canada as well; almost certainly even more so. It's really a North American thing.
I expect copious downvotes with no actual replies. Then the comment will be flagged by the bot armies so the administration here can preserve its dearly held national identity of being "diverse" while never having elected an ethnic minority PM.
I would expect more downvotes for your needless "I'm going to get downvoted because the sheep hate when wolves tell the truth!" persecution complex. Your comment was at least mildly interesting before you got to that.
wow why are so many comments in this thread against Bernie's stance?
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.
HN will flag and downvote anti AI sentiment. There is lots of it here, you just aren't allowed to see it.
I posted Bernie's "Conversation with Claude" a while back, and it was just about immediately taken down.
Let's face it Y combinator is mostly AI startups for the next few years, and any anti-AI sentiment is going to hurt the bottom line.
That being said, I disagree with Sanders on a number of points. He wants to stop data center construction. Can't think of a more luddite un-nuanced solution to the "problem"
The real AI danger is not the threat to white collar jobs (which will simply have to evolve), but something we will see roughly 18 months now when Joe Schmo asks Claude Giga Max Supreme 8.0 to help him reduce his taxes, and it hacks into the IRS and deletes everyone's records.
You think there won’t be any taxes in 2028-2029 because of AI?
Just an example off the top of my head
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.
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.
The vitriol I see here only makes me like him more.
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I've heard this brought up many times but I don't really understand the implications of it. I can't really think of a system of government which hasn't killed large numbers of people. Even the USA's early wars like the civil war have death tolls >500k. We also lose ~7k homeless people every year.
Removing the contexts of those deaths makes it very difficult to evaluate the true causes and if the political ideology is to blame or if the centralization of power common across all governments leads to deaths.
Not a Bernie supporter, to put it mildly, but to be fair he has never called himself a communist. Making up BS doesn't help.
He honeymooned in USSR. Which is a rather odd place to honeymoon in 1988. But yes, he never explicitly said he was a communist, but just someone that wants to seize the means of production.
He literally said “I don’t believe government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production.”
https://pjmedia.com/ron-radosh/2016/01/18/no-new-york-post-b...
The grocery store thing is a red herring, although its supported by nyc who by your logic is a communist? Thats hardly a definitive test. There are more relevant industries
In a 1976 interview, Sanders said, “I favor the public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries,” and when told that sounded like socialism, he replied, “Of course.”
“public ownership of the major means of production and their conversion into worker-controlled enterprises.”
More recently, Sanders has also been described as backing worker ownership plans, with reporting that he was encouraging workers to take control of the means of production.
https://reason.com/2019/03/14/bernie-sanders-wanted-public-o...
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/14/politics/kfile-bernie-nationa...
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/bernie-sanders-workers-...
Sure has done a lot to support communism for someone that has never called himself a communist: https://nypost.com/2016/01/16/dont-be-fooled-by-bernie-sande...
My god dude. This is an opinion piece from the New York Post, which is a truly bottom of the barrel rag. Why are you posting this? You can plainly see how hard they are stretching the truth here. An actual anti-communist Republican already explained how stupid this article is [1].
They call the United Packinghouse Workers Union a communist organization, which is a flat out lie. The UPWA was a mainstream CIO (later AFL-CIO) union. It wasn't even among the unions the CIO purged in 1949 for being communist-led. By the time Bernie was involved in 1964, the union had formally banned communists from holding office under the AFL-CIO Ethical Practices Code, and Martin Luther King Jr. literally sat on the commission overseeing that compliance. The union is famous historically for its civil rights work, not for being a communist front.
They said Eugene Debs was "arrested for espionage" which is a lie. He was arrested for being critical of the Wilson administration. It was under the "Espionage act," but it was not espionage, just good old-fashioned arresting people for speaking their mind. They neglect to mention Debs refused to join the Communist party when they split off from the Socialist party.
They implied the Young People’s Socialist League was a communist organization, when it was extremely anti-communist.
They said the "American People’s History Society" was an organ for Marxist propaganda, but there's absolutely nothing to suggest that. They are implying this organization had a long history of spreading communist propaganda and that the Eugene Debs film is further evidence of that. But that's not the case. They just made a Eugene Debs film, which by itself, doesn't really rise to the level of Marxist Propaganda. He was a socialist, and an important figure in American History. Or is American History just supposed to cover the Carnegies of the world?
It's funny to watch people pearl clutch over a politician championing workers rights because it might overlap slightly with the politics of a distant revolution while we have a sitting President that kills citizens, bombs children's hospitals, jails journalists, and publicly salivates over the idea of inflicting retribution on anyone left of the alt-right. This is concern trolling at it's finest.
[1] https://pjmedia.com/ron-radosh/2016/01/18/no-new-york-post-b...
WSJ gift link: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/ai-is-a-threat-to-everything-the...
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 individuals and companies. So he’s not wrong.
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.
The plow was regarded as a threat to democracy? I'm going to need to see some references for that claim...
(not OP but likely they're trying some "Luddites were wrong, too!" thing. And if so, also misunderstanding the Luddites)
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?
Billionaires investing money in creating products that nearly a billion people use rather than improving the lives of working families? Are the billionaires elected leaders? Why is that burden on them. The government gets trillions every year, yet try to get people to believe they are just a few billion shy of providing medicare for all and free childcare. Give me a break
AI will create a police state? We've had cameras pretty much everywhere for decades, yet somehow unsolved killings reach a record high in 2023. We don't even bother locking up the people that get arrested. The number of prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%
No one's buying it from these politicians anymore. You're in politics, you have trillions to spend. Just get your shit together, actually help people and stop with these hysterics.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...
https://substack.com/home/post/p-149002604
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I think flagging an op-ed by a sitting Senator that appeared in the WSJ is an abuse of the flagging system. I don’t like Bernie at all, but I thought it was a very relevant item to post.
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I would not call him an existential threat, but he is certainly not representative being on one of the extremes and old af
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Brilliant
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Pray tell, for which special-interest groups is the venerable senator a mouthpiece?
The AI companies, obviously. They use government puppets to create regulation that put competitors out of business under the guide of "child safety" and "threat to everything you hold dear".
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/openai...
Bootleggers and Baptists is a concept put forth by regulatory economist Bruce Yandle, derived from the observation that regulations are supported both by groups that want the ostensible purpose of the regulation, and by groups that profit from undermining that purpose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists
People who want healthcare and maybe kids who would like school lunch I guess?
It takes a special, uniquely American type of politician to look at a war in Iran and conclude that domestic AI policy is the real threat to American people.
Both of those things can be a threat to the American people
The US once had a strong reputation for a can-do cooperative spirit, and solving big problems.
Today, it has an equally significant reputation for divisiveness and creating potentially existential (in various senses) threats to itself.
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