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.
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.
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.
Powerful people are almost always surrounded by an insulating layer of people who tell them what they want to hear.
Do you remember when the AI CEOs spoke at college graduations? They got flustered when they were booed, they literally didn't understand why they were being booed.
I genuinely find it strange. Like, I can understand intellectually why those people might dislike AI CEOs, but I personally disagree and find most of the reasons to hate them pretty dumb.
Those are some pretty smart people working on the bleeding edge of miracle world-changing technology. Despite being pretty smart, they're also confused and disoriented by the thing they're creating but have no choice but to push forward. They're pretty open and candid about their worries too. Unlike most people, I personally see them as trailblazers and pioneers, not as loathsome parasites.
It is "pretty dumb" to hate on people who recognize they potential world ending technology they are working on but still do it anyway with no controls?
The same people that drool over the possibility that they could rule the world via AI and robots?
> working on but still do it anyway with no controls?
They are constantly talking about how dangerous it is and how it needs some controls. This is not an easy problem to solve however and controls don't magically appear just because you want them.
The option of just not working on it is also off the table.
A lot of super smart people working full time on this problem still haven't figured it out. What do you want the CEOs to realistically do here?
> The same people that drool over the possibility that they could rule the world via AI and robots?
This is just your personal conjecture. I see no real evidence of this.
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.
If you had not noticed, these AI companies already are advertising very heavily directly at the youth. OpenAi in particular is trying really hard to convince the college age crowd they are cool, though others (Google, Anthropic) have followed suit.
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.
I'm honestly tired of these comments as they fail to understand what is happening today is not the same as what happened 50 years ago.
For the past few decades people have been told over and over: no more factory? no problem! that was backbreaking work better done by robots anyway. go to college, study really hard, get a degree and you'll get a better paying job that leverages your cognitive skills. Remember all those "I was a metalworker and transitioned to web developer" stories?
And now, all of a sudden they're being told, "oops, those jobs that leveraged your cognitive skills are going away too now" (and not because we're saving humanity or some noble reason, but so rich tech companies and their share holders can get richer), and "no, we have no idea what, if any, new jobs will emerge for you".
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.
Is it the replacing workers thing so much or are young people just fucking sick of tech (and Silicon Valley in general) and AI is the latest whipping boy?
I think tech has shifted. It was a relatively balanced political ecosystem, not the far right fever swamp like finance. There were libertarians and communists, now the libertarians that read atlas shrugged have accumulated enough power to make a push to escape democracy, capitalism, and any constraints on their power. So tech isnt what it was when it was the hippie dreamer open source all the things culture people liked.
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!”
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.
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
> Palantir’s extremely controversial CEO Alex Karp scored the lowest, with 81 percent choosing “don’t trust,” while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella fared the best — albeit with a pitiful 35 percent “trust” score.
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.
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.
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.
As a young person, the data I would like to see on this topic are how AI/tech CEOs compare to CEOs on other industries. I would be surprised if Nadella polled significantly lower than the median non-tech CEO, based on gen Z's opinion of CEOs.
Unless you are cheerleader hoping to eventually be a CEO. Why would you particularly ever like this class of people? Or in financialised economy ever trust them to do anything but to maximise some metric affecting the price of the stock or whatever.
And distrust is reasonable stance for most people. Goals of financial system don't most of time align with well being of everyone in the population.
I came across a video in my YouTube feed - “where are all the serial killers”.
Half way through the video it clicked. The presenter said that it was because we have better tools to detect and decadent behavior and traits such as psychopathy early.
But I think that most of the psychopaths are now either politicians or CEOs. They can still kill without the fear of getting caught or dirtying the hands.
45 comments
[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 31.3 ms ] threadI'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.
It's hard to see why basically anyone would at this point.
Do you remember when the AI CEOs spoke at college graduations? They got flustered when they were booed, they literally didn't understand why they were being booed.
Those are some pretty smart people working on the bleeding edge of miracle world-changing technology. Despite being pretty smart, they're also confused and disoriented by the thing they're creating but have no choice but to push forward. They're pretty open and candid about their worries too. Unlike most people, I personally see them as trailblazers and pioneers, not as loathsome parasites.
The same people that drool over the possibility that they could rule the world via AI and robots?
They are constantly talking about how dangerous it is and how it needs some controls. This is not an easy problem to solve however and controls don't magically appear just because you want them.
The option of just not working on it is also off the table.
A lot of super smart people working full time on this problem still haven't figured it out. What do you want the CEOs to realistically do here?
> The same people that drool over the possibility that they could rule the world via AI and robots?
This is just your personal conjecture. I see no real evidence of this.
For the past few decades people have been told over and over: no more factory? no problem! that was backbreaking work better done by robots anyway. go to college, study really hard, get a degree and you'll get a better paying job that leverages your cognitive skills. Remember all those "I was a metalworker and transitioned to web developer" stories?
And now, all of a sudden they're being told, "oops, those jobs that leveraged your cognitive skills are going away too now" (and not because we're saving humanity or some noble reason, but so rich tech companies and their share holders can get richer), and "no, we have no idea what, if any, new jobs will emerge for you".
(Or maybe I'm just projecting.)
say what you will about uber but it is a seamless service. there are a lot of great apps out there.
now tech isn't making things better it's rapidly converting to aggressive rent seeking, and everyone can see it.
only a rube thinks Big Tech is going to make tomorrow better for everyone.
I hope my prediction is wrong.
But it was never cool. Having money can fake being cool though, at least for a while.
Now the capitalists who control the technology are in bed with the government, it certainly is uncool. But in a totally different way than before.
this seems to be the list:
> Palantir’s extremely controversial CEO Alex Karp scored the lowest, with 81 percent choosing “don’t trust,” while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella fared the best — albeit with a pitiful 35 percent “trust” score.
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.
Who could have seen this coming?
And distrust is reasonable stance for most people. Goals of financial system don't most of time align with well being of everyone in the population.
Half way through the video it clicked. The presenter said that it was because we have better tools to detect and decadent behavior and traits such as psychopathy early.
But I think that most of the psychopaths are now either politicians or CEOs. They can still kill without the fear of getting caught or dirtying the hands.
https://youtu.be/iRgin1tWIT8