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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've seen with LLMs that I've not seen with any other emergent technology is the level of backlash against it. I think we're seeing a point of polarization in society where there will be two truly opposing sides that are against each other and no reconciliation will be possible between them (pro and anti-AI), and that it has a good chance of fundamentally destabilizing society.

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> I've not seen with any other emergent technology is the level of backlash against it.

i think those who had backlashes against machines and automation in the past would be similar tbh.

It's because when people feel, even if remotely, their livelihood going down the drain, they do anything and everything to fight it (even if it would be against the interest of overall progress - nobody wants to be the "sacrifice").

I mean, Luddites were hanged for murdering people. We're not quite there yet.

They were not just fighting for their livelihoods, though; the fight was at least as much about dignity and fair treatment.

And they were correct to do so: skilled workers who lost their work and ended up in industrial employment did not have better lives. It took a century to a century-and-a-half for industrial quality of life to get back to pre-industrial quality of life.

Loss of dignity is something that the AI industry is not considering as it renders entire swathes of the economy button-pushers for chatbots.

When loss of livelihood appears it will be too late and at too great a scale to fight back in the workplace; the fightback will be somewhere else.

H.G Wells Time Machine has future society split into to: the childish consumer class and the driven engineering class, and the consumer class is the food of the engineering class. I could see this happening, with how cruel so many are, and trying to institutionalize that attitude.

Silicon Valley tech workers are not the subterranean Munrungs. They are the surface-dwelling Eloi. They just don't know it yet.

> One thing I've seen with LLMs that I've not seen with any other emergent technology is the level of backlash against it.

Blockchain and other cryptocurrency related technologies?

I'm pretty sure that an average person has no idea what blockchain is.

The average person has no idea what LLMs are. The average person (in the west at least) has heard of and has an opinion on ChatGPT and Bitcoin.

I've seen a lot of people not wanting to learn to use a computer ("I prefer the old way") or not wanting to have a mobile phone ("I don't want to be reachable all the time") or a smartphone with touchscreen ("This feels like a too close interaction between the human and the device").

It's not a normal technology.

I haven't seen much splitting into two groups of people who are for and against. It's more that individuals can see upsides - does cool stuff, and downsides - something like a rival lifeform that will be smarter than us.

I think that's a pretty odd framing, because the upsides are pretty relative and lopsided to those receiving certain benefits. The people who are anti-AI often are those who can acknowledge that AI does cool stuff, but that it's not worth it and doesn't provide any real benefit except by helping people keep up in a frenetic arms race to develop new tech.

Personally, I'm against AI but even if it could never be smarter than us and if it were at the state that it was last year, I'd still be against it due to the environmental cost.

I'm mildly pro but agree on the environmental costs. I think they should try to make it green energy only though not much chance with the current US admin. I'm not so enthused with current AI. I use last years like language translation a lot and I'm interested in the possible sci-fi future like curing diseases, some sort of immortality, abundance etc.

You missed Gnome v KDE

I keep seeing it and it's really bipolar. Boosters think it's the best thing ever and downplays all the issues while antis think it's completely useless and a disaster environmentally and morally.

Good luck saying LLMs are useful but still a net negative in the filter bubble this author is in. No, you also need to think it has zero utility or you're the enemy.

One datapoint on the same people seeing pro and anti is Nick Bostrom (Swedish philosopher & writer) who was one of the instigators of AI doom with his 2014 book:

Superintelligence 2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dang...

has now brought out another book on the positives:

Deep Utopia 2024 https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/deep-utopia-life-and-meaning-in-...

I was just watching an interview with him:

Nick Bostrom Says We Are Clueless About What's Coming https://youtu.be/J9WBZ8BTLLg https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/01/opinion/interesting-times... - rattles on a bit

Apparently Yudkowsky was influenced by the 2014 book in coming up with his stuff.

The timeline is older than that.

Yudkowsky wrote about AI since the 1990s, his first realization of the AI danger was circa 2001, his "Sequences" were 2006-2009.

Bostrom also wrote much earlier about AI existential risk, see e.g. this paper of him from 2002:

https://www.jetpress.org/volume9/risks.html

Well yeah, that's because it's political. The theat of job (and more importantly income) losses as well as twitter accelerationists, AI art slop spammers and anxiety trolls have really fueled the fire to the degree that people hate this stuff.

Not to mention how creepy Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are.

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