Hacker News Reader

Comment by schiem | Hacker News Reader

I find this comment fascinating for a few reasons. The first is that it has the underlying assumption that all "progress" is good (regardless of what we're progressing towards). From my perspective, it seems like most of the progress being made is towards bringing about a sort of techno-feudalism and environmental collapse. Maybe a little bit less progress would actually benefit humanity?

The second thing revolves around this:

> In fact using AI brings back the magic of technology that we lost in the 90s with the "business-ifying" of tech.

This is the complete opposite of my experience. AI seems like the logical conclusion of the business-ifying of tech. Get rid of all those pesky nerds, and the MBAs can just create whatever grift pops into their head.

View on HN

> From my perspective, it seems like most of the progress being made is towards bringing about a sort of techno-feudalism and environmental collapse. Maybe a little bit less progress would actually benefit humanity?

I'd argue you're conflating two independent axis: technological progress and societal inequality.

AI is useful today and is getting more powerful and efficient. This is obviously great for humanity! It's enabling discoveries that were previously out of reach, and allowing us to accomplish the same amount of work with less effort.

AI is also generating massive amounts of money for the wealthy and powerful and increasing inequality. This is not great for humanity!

I do think it's important to keep in mind that this centralization of power and wealth is not caused by AI directly: the pattern exists whenever there's a desirable but scarce resource. The same argument that AI is increasing inequality can reasonably be made about concrete, steel, and steam engines. The problems caused by AI are really human problems at their core. It's possible AI could even help us fix them! (I'm not at all hopeful.)

LLMs haven't enabled any discoveries that were previously out of reach. If you disagree, name one?

>AI is useful today and is getting more powerful and efficient

No, it's getting less efficient at an exponential rate without proportional performance gains

>do think it's important to keep in mind that this centralization of power and wealth is not caused by AI directly: the pattern exists whenever there's a desirable but scarce resource. The same argument that AI is increasing inequality can reasonably be made about concrete, steel, and steam engines.

The goal of these LLM companies is to funnel all economic activity through their models. LLMs only exist because of how they strip mined human work without consent or compensation. I.e. LLMs do directly cause the centralization of wealth and power by how they were designed and how they are meant to be used.

> LLMs haven't enabled any discoveries that were previously out of reach. If you disagree, name one?

While not an LLM, protein folding is now often done via transformer.

> No, it's getting less efficient at an exponential rate without proportional performance gains

AI is expanding in both directions. Sure, it's eating the world with its compute demand and the bitter lesson bites, but we're also seeing drastically improved efficiencies employed alongside. The cost per task is dropping fast.

> The goal of these LLM companies is to funnel all economic activity through their models.

That's what all companies want, AI or otherwise.

No arguments here on the ethics of AI companies though.

You can argue the degree to which they influence each other, but technological progress and societal inequality are definitely not "independent axis".

We live in a capitalist society, where human (intellectual) labor has immense value and grants social mobility.

Take away intellectual labor and society becomes inherently less equal, i.e. feudalistic.

I think progress is inevitable. Sometimes good, sometimes bad (in my perspective). I love AI but I don't like the eco-damage required to power it (not just water/electricity, but rare earth mining and the human rights violations that go with it). I don't think you can go backwards though.

I was just pointing out the logical tension in the comment I was replying to.

> This is the complete opposite of my experience. AI seems like the logical conclusion of the business-ifying of tech. Get rid of all those pesky nerds, and the MBAs can just create whatever grift pops into their head.

I have dozens of extremely nerdy projects going thanks to AI. I wouldn't have had time for any of them because I was too busy making money to spend 100+ extra hours programming my wildest tech fantasies, but now that's possible!

AI also makes it possible to do hardware programming, reverse engineering (when Anthropic isn't censoring itself) and all manner of other geeky pursuits.

Sure, I agree that progress (towards something) is inevitable. But in the dichotomy presented ("progress" vs. "programmers feelings"), I took progress to mean "the things we're currently making progress on [with regards to AI]." Which I would say are largely a wealth concentration machine, and will probably be a net negative for humanity. To more directly respond to the original question of "progress or programmer feelings", I would ask why we can't just do something else entirely?

I'm genuinely happy that you're having fun with it. I can't get over the feeling that _I'm not building anything._ To me, it seems like hopping on an IRC channel and copy-pasting code from a greybeard instead of writing it myself. I just don't find that satisfying at all.

You clearly don't care about the eco-damage or else you wouldn't be using Big Tech's LLMs lol.

And let's not kid ourselves, you aren't programming anything. You are paying Anthropic to brute force the code for you with their supercomputer which was only built thanks to the rare earth mining and human rights violations you claim to be bothered about.

There is truth to what you're saying. I desperately want local models to be powerful enough to use and I'm sure they will soon enough.

> Get rid of all those pesky nerds, and the MBAs can just create whatever grift pops into their head.

They have a hard time dealing with those people that tell them their ideas are bad, unethical, or illegal.

Now they have their Fisher-Price steering wheel hooked into the drive train of the business!

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-08-18...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com