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- Hacker News
- by karakoram
- It's the latest form of elitism - like in less sunny countries it's fashionable to be tanned because it means you are rich enough to have time to hang around on the beach while in sunny countries it's fashionable to be light skinned because you are rich enough that you don't have to work in the sun. Disdain for AI is a luxury belief of those who are either talented enough to draw / write / code without or are wealthy enough to not have to.
- > Disdain for AI is a luxury belief ...
Or a belief of those scared that an imploding "AI" bubble will ruin their financial futures. Or just that most of the humans in their own white collar professions will be replaced by AI's.
by bell-cot - This place sure lost interest in meritocracy fast once mediocrity became available to everyone.
- We're calling skills a 'luxury' now? Doing actual work to learn things?by aydenp
- Is it though? I thought elite engineers needed to consume billions of tokens monthly and/or pay >100 USD subscriptions to AI tools to realize their potential.by mrbungie
- Previously on the Gallup study:
- We know that AI will ultimately just end up enriching a very small group of people with no change in prosperity for working and middle classes. CEOs are openly saying as much. For the past number of decades the rise in productivity has been completely detached from wages, it'll be no different this time.
We're also no strangers to enshittification, we have first hand experience of technology causing negative societal effects when in the hands of for-profit entities.
by cedws - The cool thing about the current generation of AI tools is how easy it is to uncover bias or an agenda in an article like this.
paste the verge article text into your favorite AI tool and ask for an analysis.
Make sure to ask it to read the source Gallup data that this article leans on and compare the conclusions drawn.
by tarr11 - > The cool thing about the current generation of AI tools is how easy it is to uncover bias or an agenda in an article like this.
This is only true if you assume that an AI tool is itself unbiased. I'm not sure how anyone can earnestly believe AI tools are unbiased after Grok's MechaHitler episode [0], unless they just aren't giving it much critical thought.
0 - https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...
by not_wyoming - So are you outsourcing your thinking? You just prove the article's point
- Would this show bias of Gallup or of Verge or of the Ai training data? How would you determine which?by ericjmorey
- And then how do you uncover bias in your chatbot? Do you ask it to analyze its own analysis? For that matter, what about the bias in your prompt, which LLMs tend to accept uncritically? Do your own preconceived opinions bias you against the argument made in the article? Are you using a chatbot to think critically about the article, or to avoid thinking critically about your own beliefs?
> At the same time, 79 percent of those surveyed by Gallup “expressed concern that AI makes people lazier,” and 65 percent said that using chatbots “promotes instant gratification, not real understanding” and prevents people from engaging with ideas in a critical or meaningful way.
Perhaps you should take a cue from these surveyees and do your own thinking.
by bccdee - The cool thing about critical reasoning is how easy it is to uncover bias or agenda in an article like this.
I suspect that as you rely more on a robot for this your own skills will atrophy.
by sonofhans - Paywalled so I can't read the article.
However, is this exclusive to young people? I'm a millenial (early 90s) and I share their sentiment. I might not share it for the same reason though. Personally, I'm concerned about what AI usage would do to my cognitive ability, and as such I try to limit my use. I can't avoid using it at work (we're being tracked on "AI Adoption") and it does genuinely speed up some of my tasks. And I do play around with AI coding tools, mostly because I think I _should_ know them in this day and age.
But apart from that, I'm not using it. I'm using DDG searches rather than asking ChatGPT for solutions, I still go around reading websites and papers instead of AI summaries, and I don't outsource my writing to it. (i.e, I write my own emails, my own blogs, my own poorly worded HN comments, etc).
by Insanity - by karakoram
- Fellow millenial here. I rarely use AI, for similar reasons. Not only am I worried about cognitive decline, I also have plenty of ethical concerns and I don't want to become even more dependent on US megacorps. Fortunately, I'm writing my own software and nobody can tell me which tools to use :)by spacechild1
- I don't think it's exclusive to young people, no. I'm a couple years older than you. All of my friends also hate it and make fun of it. Like some of the people in the article, I'm also looking to get out of the tech industry and find something else to do other than be forced to talk to shitty robots. If they want to fire me for not using their crappy tech enough, fine. I don't care anymore.by coldpie
- by vlod
- I think a lot of people have already experienced that LLMs are useless by themselves. Ultimately what can make them useful are humans who are directing them, who understand their work and have concrete goals, who know how to verify LLM outputs which always contain at least a few hallucinations that can steer entire session off the cliff. And the hatred comes from the fact that their bosses whose AI usage is for the most part is limited to writing and summarizing emails are rubbing their hands together when they can lay off everyone and have their businesses run by AI.by pllbnk
- I think that comments like this are not helpful for humanism.
Us pogressives should stop trying to argue that AI actually sucks, it obviously doesn't and will continue to improve.
We would start organizing and thinking about ways to build a society where the average human can still have a solid, interesting quality of life even when solid AI is everywhere.
by make3 - The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes. Synthesizing different opinions, summarizing them, and producing outputs based on statistics are things AI does well.
But AI is actually not very good at replacing an entire lower-level worker’s job as a whole. It works well only when that work is broken down into smaller and smaller tasks.
The core problem is this: the coercive force of AI use is felt by the lower classes, while the upper classes still have the freedom not to use it. AI may be able to make decisions based on more data than executives do, and perhaps even make better decisions than management. Yet the people being replaced are the lower-level workers.
This is the problem. The upper classes, who claim that AI is an essential tool, still have the freedom not to use it. But the lower classes cannot survive unless they use it. It becomes a tool required for survival, while at the same time being treated as something wrong, inferior, or low-status if you use it.
To get a job, AI becomes an essential survival tool. But culturally, it is also treated as a tool that damages creativity. I see this in open-source communities as well, in the class discourse around open source.
The same culture appears on Hacker News. Among the upper layer of open-source communities, there is often hostility toward AI-generated code, based on ideas of human purity: AI code is said to have no meaning, no responsibility, no real authorship. So even within open source, this takes on a class character.
But as a freelance developer, I have to trade against my own code-writing ability in order to survive and deliver. Because of AI, the floor price of software delivery has collapsed. If I do not use AI, I cannot meet the new requirements.
In the past, a job that would have given me two months and paid $5,000 is now expected to be completed in two weeks for the same $5,000. Without AI, that volume of work is impossible to handle.
This kind of discourse always makes me uncomfortable. I dislike it, but I have to use it.
AI lowers the barrier to creation and learning, but the way it lowers that barrier can also bypass the training of thought itself. It turns young people into both beneficiaries and damaged subjects at the same time.
And we live under this loop of coercion. Sometimes I think I do not want to use AI.
But if I want to survive, I have to use it. I feel the abilities I once took pride in beginning to decay, and I feel myself becoming increasingly bound to AI companies. At the same time, I also feel another kind of ability beginning to emerge.
Perhaps growing older means learning how to live inside irony.
by jdw64 - > The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes
This is why the harshest critics of AI tend to be white collar workers of this social class. The same kinds that told coal miners and autoworkers to "learn to code" and called them deplorables for voting nativist in 2016.
Any chance to build mutual trust was squandered. The jobs worst impacted by AI are jobs where most of the workers are Democrats and live in blue states that don't swing.
Meanwhile, those manufacturing, construction, and healthcare jobs that are becoming a bigger part of the economy tend to be in the purple part of the country so their needs are heard.
by alephnerd - > In the past, a job that would have given me two months and paid $5,000 is now expected to be completed in two weeks for the same $5,000.
So you have quadrupled your income? That seems like the opposite of a collapse.
by mzi - > The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes. Synthesizing different opinions, summarizing them, and producing outputs based on statistics are things AI does well.
It’s really not though. A lot of sort of incidental communication that people don’t really read carefully it’s fine at. But the actual hard stuff it’s just not that great. It’s basically average by design so it almost definitionally incapable of being great.
I’ve been trying to use AI for putting together job applications, tailor my resume and cover letter and stuff. But it’s just not good. It’s decent if I want a sanity-check analysis as in “how does this come across generically.” But if I ask it to write anything it sound like LinkedIn slop. I expect if everyone starts using this to write their basic communication you’ll be in a world where nobody is reading anything anyone says because it’s so BORING. Everyone sounds the same, everything is phrased in this sort of mushy and generic way. At that point the intended communication isn’t happening! We will have sanded away all the rough edges to the point where you can’t actually get a grip on anything anymore.
At another point I tried to test it out and asked it to wireframe a very basic application for me. Something that should have been a very lightweight thing that runs on device to do a basic background process it architected as some crazy overcomplicated enterprise-scaled thing as if I’m trying to build a unicorn startup out of this rather than just a toy app to organize my shopping list. If I wasn’t technically savvy enough to recognize it was way overcomplicating things I’d have just run with this. And what’s worse is, it burns through all your token budget to figure out a bunch of problems you don’t need to have!
Obviously I’m using it and find it useful, but I’ve started to develop serious doubts about how useful it will ever be without an informed and accountable attendant overseeing it.
by naravara - >The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes. Synthesizing different opinions, summarizing them, and producing outputs based on statistics are things AI does well.
AI just repeats whatever the prevailing opinion is at that time. I am a very heavy AI user (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT) and have queried it on a variety of topics. AI is not thinking, it is repeating.
by htx80nerd - Gen-Z is pretty cool. The problem is a small subset of Gen-X and Millenials who have too much money and power and treat AI as if it is the Dianetics bible from SciFi author Ron L. Hubbard (who according to James Randi knew exactly what he was doing).
There are truly mentally unwell people in charge who would like get out the E-meter and audit everyone who does not follow their new Scientology knockoff. Yes, the advertising methods and suppression of opposition are the same.
by kald145 - You're delusional if you're implying that thinking AI is a threat to the existence of the middle class is coocoo.
The actual progressive thing to do is to accept that it is, and think of how to build the world in a way that protects people.
by make3
I'm currently reading a fascinating book called Blood In The Machine° about the Luddites who opposed certain technologies in 19th century England and the parallels with the current state of affairs. It's important to remember that while history doesn't repeat itself, it often rhymes.> They are being told, on the one hand, that these tools are going to eliminate millions of jobs, and on the other that they have to use them if they don’t want to fall behind.° https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59801798-blood-in-the-ma...
by Lyngbakr- The nuance that’s talked less about is that both statements can be and likely will be true, but which way will the balance swing:
1. Many jobs will be eliminated (will they be offset by new jobs?)
2. The new technology will need to be adopted if you don’t want to fall behind (will there be less of these jobs or more?)
In past circumstances like the one you mentioned, there were more jobs than before. Ultimately we all just want to consume endlessly. That pressure creates more demand when prices lower, which causes businesses to compete via differentiation, which creates more jobs. I don’t think this situation will be any different
by jameslk