Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It's Almost Hard to Believe

hhealsdata about 4 hours ago 59 commentsRead Article on futurism.com

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Discussion Sentiment

35% Positive

Analyzed from 1984 words in the discussion.

Discussion (59 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

RivieraKid•about 3 hours ago

I'm not that young anymore but when I hear Dario Amodei speak and gesticulate enthusiastically about how AI will soon make my job redundant, from a positio of someone who can retire now and who benefits from AI possibly replacing workers, it's very hard to like him.

piloto_ciego•18 minutes ago

Man, I see this stuff, and I think, "my god! think of the opportunity we have to replace the current economic system with something where we're not all in a fierce knife fight to try to stay employed so we don't starve!"

We have to stop fearing the machines and start fearing the firmware running on our brains! It's capitalism that's the problem, not the robots... if anything the robots can liberate us from capital's death grip!

grebc•11 minutes ago

It’s amusing to imagine the oligarchs are going to anymore charitable than currently.

giancarlostoro•about 2 hours ago

Lets suppose everyone in the world miraculously loses their jobs to AI, who is paying for it? How? What are they selling? What stops the rest of humanity from turning data centers into a pile of ash?

These people are so disconnected from reality.

cute_boi•37 minutes ago

And, idk what is the end goal here. Even if 20% of people lose their job the crime and prostitution will shoot up....

scotty79•about 1 hour ago

You also just explained how people fearing that AI will take all jobs are equally disconnected from reality. Although in less joyful manner.

r_lee•about 1 hour ago

what kind of bargaining power will you have with "well someone must consume!"?

bbor•about 2 hours ago

Talk about shooting the messenger…

JustResign•about 2 hours ago

A CEO of a large AI company is hardly just a "messenger" here. Come on now.

superze•about 1 hour ago

He is just the poor little head of the snake.

bbor•35 minutes ago

I… yes, he is. He wasn’t born when this was put in motion by Turing in 1950, and he quit OpenAI to try to stick to their original mission, which was exclusively and ambitiously to prevent what most (who cared to look at it) assumed was inevitable.

AI isn’t a new iPhone moment, it’s a fire moment. Dario Amodei didn’t bring it into existence, physics did — we’re just slowly working out the cognitive science for the first time after Crysis machines ended up being really good at something that our type of intelligence relies on (intuitive framing via huge neural networks — see The Frame Problem).

Also this doesn’t really matter in anthropic’s case, but FWIW: we should try to blame CEOs a bit less, and shareholders (capitalists) a lot more. Our system isn’t named ‘officerism’, after all!

happytoexplain•about 2 hours ago

He's the guy doing the thing that he is delivering the message about...

solid_fuel•about 2 hours ago

The CEO of a major AI company is not “the messenger”

59nadir•about 3 hours ago

How oblivious are people to the world that they think this is somehow strange or hard to believe? Why would they like any of the tech CEOs, or CEOs in general?

It's hard to see why basically anyone would at this point.

mitchdoogle•35 minutes ago

Because the products these companies produce are extremely popular, and people benefit from them.

bbor•about 2 hours ago

Sure, CEOs are rarely appreciated in general. But the anti-tech sentiment is absolutely a new and rapidly growing beast. It’s different — trust me.

chillfox•about 2 hours ago

A lot of tech recently has just made things worse.

Uber made the taxi experience way worse and less predictable.

Now, I can’t just walk out of a bar, get into a clean taxi and go home, I have to fiddle with an app, wait, wave trying to identify “my” ride, then hope it’s clean and safe. It’s a nightmare compared to what we had before.

Uber eats made food delivery significantly worse and more expensive.

It used to be that I could get food delivered for a known fixed price, it would arrive while still hot and it would be delivered to the door. Now, the price is obfuscated, there’s an extra fee for getting the food warm, sometimes the drinks are spilled into the bag, delivery is to the curb so I have to go outside to get it.

There’s a lot more that has been made worse by tech companies.

ishouldstayaway•about 1 hour ago

I agree wholeheartedly with your first sentence here. But I find it difficult to think of a worse example you could have picked than taxis. For all Uber's many faults, the taxi companies were worse. Hell they're still worse.

Are you old enough to remember the bad old days?

gdulli•about 1 hour ago

TV has unskippable and targeted commercials now. The list goes on and on.

throw-the-towel•about 1 hour ago

My experience with Uber is the opposite, FWIW.

piloto_ciego•16 minutes ago

It's just Neo Luddite stuff... we don't have to accept the current status quo. Good lord I'd love it if all my needs were met by the abundance of the planet and I could spend my days working on projects I liked and exploring.

Why can't anyone see beyond their job?

defrost•10 minutes ago

It's not the no job part that troubles them, it's the question of where basic levels of food, clothing, shelter are going to come from, and the means to have objects of desire and the freedom to travel.

Maybe you can't see that, but for a good many people hovering about the knife edge of just getting by such things are a pressing concern.

Perhaps in future Halcyon days when all needs are met joy will be had by all .. right now there's a looming gap of uncertainty for many.

happytoexplain•about 2 hours ago

The pace of growth of hatred is new (thanks to AI, mostly), but it's been sitting at a simmer for 20 years.

Avicebron•about 2 hours ago

It's a crisis of trust, on that point I do find myself agreeing with Dario. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323245

edit: There are solutions to this. See link.

rc5150•19 minutes ago

Whenever somebody qualifies a statement with "trust me", my first inclination and deepest instinct is to ignore that statement. Saying it doesn't make you more believable or authoritative on... anything. Trust me.

shirro•about 1 hour ago

I heard my 12yo uses "AI" as a synonym for crap in a context which had nothing to do with machine learning. There is a pronounced and growing disconnect between the fervently pro-AI messaging on platforms like HN and regular people. Anti-AI sentiment goes deep and has momentum. A few billion dollars of marketing and influencer spend isn't going to turn it around. When the bubble deflates as most people feel it must I think it will only reinforce the negativity.

newsomix9xl•8 minutes ago

Blaming a tough job market on AI, and claiming AI pivots are the reasons for layoffs, while claiming AI can destroy humanity.

Who could have seen this coming?

jefurii•about 2 hours ago

What's so surprising? The AI CEOs hate them and are trying to destroy the world they live in along with their job prospects.

kj4211cash•about 1 hour ago

I wonder how much of this is caused by income inequality. There are some young people I talk to that are genuinely worried about whether AI will take all the jobs. But there are a lot more that rightfully realize that they probably can't afford the middle class life their parents had and are annoyed at all the money AI is hoovering up and how rich these CEOs are. And that's the surface level. There's all sorts of resentment that hasn't really been thought through and wouldn't exist if we had the sort of real growth in lower- and middle-class incomes that we used to.

cucumber3732842•18 minutes ago

It's not the inequality. It's the lack of hope for a better future. Nobody cares how rich the richest people are when their lives are getting better.

arjie•about 3 hours ago

These popularity contests are won and lost based on marketing content on TikTok. If the opinions of young people were relevant they'd be appropriately shifted on demand. Few of them are reasoned positions so they can be shifted one way or the other with targeted advertising.

bogzz•26 minutes ago

And this kind of thinking is part of the reason behind the hatred.

ggoo•about 1 hour ago

The young people are probably on to something. They are the future after all.

piskov•about 3 hours ago

“Hate” for “Don’t trust” seems like a pure clickbait material

Finnucane•about 3 hours ago

The title is wrong: it is easy to believe.

2OEH8eoCRo0•about 2 hours ago

Technology is not cool anymore.

add-sub-mul-div•about 2 hours ago

This makes me think of last year when Adobe made a Bluesky account and got shouted off the platform within a day for no other reason than Adobe sucks. I have hope that it signals a trend that certain audiences are simply starting to exercise taste.

m463•about 2 hours ago

Are there any CEOs people do trust? (I wonder how it compares if someone made a list of politicians)

this seems to be the list:

  65% Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
  70% Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg
  70% Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
  70% OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
  70% SpaceX CEO Elon Musk
  75% Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai
  75% Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei
  79% Palantir Chairman Peter Thiel
  81% Palantir CEO Alex Karp

Razengan•about 1 hour ago

More likely it's the politicians and lawyers etc. that are afraid of AI empowering the peasant class, so they're telling the commoners to divert their angst against AI.

Oh AI will take our jobs..? LET IT!!

Who wants to work all your life and still not be able to afford a house?

Instead of asking to be wage slaves your entire lives, demand your politicians to give you UBI.

smegger001•44 minutes ago

>Oh AI will take our jobs..? LET IT!!

Except people still need to eat and.pay for a roof over their heaf

>Who wants to work all your life and still not be able to afford a house?

That is the fear they have from ai

>Instead of asking to be wage slaves your entire lives, demand your politicians to give you UBI.

Except the same people leading these companies do everytjing thaey can to avoid paying taxes that could fund ubi.

Elons whole Doge fiasco, the google guys fighting wealth taxes in california all fights against helping the people they are displacing. The tech ceos talk a good game about an ai powered life of luxury and ease but its not for you and me its for them and fuck the proles.

DecoPerson•about 2 hours ago

The Butlerian Jihad is coming. It will happen sooner than we think. It will start with Australia, where the popular vote matters the most for political power. “Vote for the Greens! We’ll ban AI! We’ll bring your jobs back! Your savings account will earn interest again! The AI scams will stop!” All false promises, of course. The laws will be pathetic: “Prohibited digital intelligence — any digital system capable of learning, adapting, remembering, recalling, generating, or interpreting information of a textual, visual, audio, interactive or other form.” It will be the Minister’s choice regarding which companies are in the (new) enforcement agency’s crosshairs. Misunderstood situations (like a Tesla running over a child that it didn’t detect) will be used as the war cry. “AI is dangerous! AI cannot be trusted! AI is being used by criminals!”

I hope my prediction is wrong.

legobmw99•about 2 hours ago

A democratic movement leading to increased regulation, even if you think such a thing would be misguided, is hardly a jihad…

chillfox•about 1 hour ago

That actually sounds pretty good to me.

binary132•about 2 hours ago

If there will be any Butlerian Anything, it will be a reaction to the excruciatingly pathetic attempts at legislating the problem into a slightly smaller problem.

Grimblewald•about 1 hour ago

not really difficult. Genocide is a rather niche thing to like, and supporting it puts you in lockstep with those perpetrating.

echelon•about 3 hours ago

Young people don't know who AI CEOs are without the media apparatus teaching them AI is bad.

I've watched journalists dunk on this tech since the days of Tacotron. They love to dish out hate and venom and crystalize it around concepts that are easy to sell.

Not that the Dario and Sam haven't both been deliberately hyperbolic and made themselves easy targets, but the media was always attempting to do this.

Journalists hate AI and they always have.

We've seen them try dozens, if not hundreds of things to get the story to stick. Lately it's data centers being built and the stories of neighbors complaining about noise.

As much as I blame Sam for getting people angry at him, journalists also contributed to radicalizing people against him and turning him into an assassination target.

This headline is literally trying to reinforce this.

atomicnumber3•about 3 hours ago

Yeah has nothing to do with all the "permanent underclass" stuff right?

echelon•about 3 hours ago

Not gonna happen with open source.

ohyoutravel•about 3 hours ago

And yet AI CEOs preach the “AI will take your job and you’ll be homeless” narrative so hard.

sublinear•about 2 hours ago

A significant portion of the population didn't need journalists feeding them a negative opinion.

More people alive today are educated in computer science than ever before. The same is true of epistemology, linguistics, and broader philosophy. Many have also lived long enough to see previous waves of AI come and go.

People were already watching the topic closely over a decade ago with DeepMind, AlphaGo, etc. None of the arguments against the current AI methods are new. People were poking holes in statistical methods centuries ago.

Mainstream media just waits for the right time to pounce and attempt to sway everyone else who is uncertain or out of the loop. They actually started out with a pro-AI stance. That in no way implies the majority was ever out of the loop or believed in any of the hype. The public are not a flock of baby birds waiting for their empty minds to be fed.

The majority doesn't even care about the principle of the matter. They are far more interested in whether it actually works reliably. The appeals to emotion, political bias, or ego are wildly out of touch and outdated. What you're observing today with young people is not that they have different "opinions", but that they are burned out on all opinions. We forced them to become so much more sophisticated and discerning by pressing that button too many times. You'd be just as cynical if you spent your childhood watching an iPad deliver endless ragebait.

voidmain0001•about 3 hours ago

I doubt any of the cited CEOs will care. “And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake I shake it off, I shake it off (whoo-hoo-hoo)” - Taylor Swift.

throwaway27448•about 3 hours ago

I don't think anyone is worried about a CEO's ego, lol. Society can only protect them so much in a material sense... just ask Brian Thompson.

lukewarm707•36 minutes ago

after the rise comes the fall.

sthkr•about 3 hours ago

Automation is such an old concept invented back in the 1st century AD. Furthermore, I don't see people hating the CEOs of Siemens, Honeywell, Schneider Electric, ABB, Yokogawa, Emerson, Allen Bradley, GE Fanuc, Kuka, Hyundia, Mitsubishi etc. They've been automating entire industries & manufacturing with their controllers (PLCs, DCS etc), SCADA, HMI & systems for decades. The first PLC was invented by General Motors back in 1968. China has entire dark factories making phones and their electric cars. The media is only crying now because their cushy office, journalism and art jobs are slowly going away.

lithocarpus•about 2 hours ago

Even to whatever extent this is what's happening, a stopped clock is right twice a day applies.

add-sub-mul-div•about 2 hours ago

I don't come down on anyone for failing to foresee how the web 2.0/social-media/streaming eras would evolve to be used against us more than for us. I'm as guilty as anyone. But in 2026 there's no excuse for failing to apply lessons from the last decade or two to extrapolate where AI is going.