They aren't out of touch when it comes to the prospect of cutting jobs and how it will pump their stock portfolios. They are drooling so hard the big risk is that they make the axe handle slick and throw the axe instead of slicing the job prospects of those in the audience.

It's ironic that these speakers tout AI benefits but failed to use it to learn what college students are concerned about

It’s just a completely different class + being an exec requires certain personal traits. These two combine to whatever we see nowadays. You can call it detachments or whatever, but to be a successful exec you basically have to be a big asshole and a giant owbua.

Basically they believe whatever they did is righteous in a religious way, and how can you not see it? These types of thoughts.

There is no middle ground.

If I had to guess, I'd say it's a non-zero, but double-digit percentage of each of those, depending on the person.

you could have stopped with AI makes them rich. Why cares about anyone else.

>Their behaviors feel so detached and alien to me.

Because they are. Extreme wealth is literally a brain disease. It is physically impossible to remain a normal empathetic human being with that level of detachment from reality. Back when things were 10x, or 100x difference, there was still some amount of reality that just couldn't be abstracted away from you having to deal with. But the modern day reality of >1000x disparity has completely removed that, and they are more or less living as demigods to us in comparison.

Absolutely. They have no idea the vitriol my classmates have for them. I really am worried, lot of friends are very casual about their extremism. When anger and disgust is the feeling of the majority: it’s only a matter of time…

In nyc, elder rats have been known to encourage younger rats to take the first bite, to determine if the food is poisoned

That was the gist of mine as well. "There are too many problems and too few people who care. So please care, and don't let the size of the problems keep you from caring."

Totally agree, cut the kids a break and give them a pat on the back and tell them something inspiring! Try to remember what it was like to be in their shoes on that day.

Edit: I don’t mean “kids” in a condescending way, I just mean young people taking the first steps into adulthood and careers.

[delayed]

"Not every second has to dedicated to "problems"." I was a lot quicker to agree with this sentiment in prior decades where we had notionally fewer of them, the big ones seemed better understood, and the folks managing the levers of power at least managed the appearance of competence.

And they’re not going to do anything about it, just boo on command and go to work

> the kids finally understand who to blame

You do realise that “sticking it to the man” is something that kids are uniquely good at?

This isn’t something that’s only just happened in the last generation. It’s how society has operated since before we lived in caves.

That statement makes sense for Eric Schmidt but not the random real estate executive. I'm pretty sure they're just taking their anger out at the nearest target

Staying with your rapist husband/boyfriend is the norm. He might beg for forgiveness and say he won't do it again. He might say he didn't understand you when you said no. He might threaten to kill you if you open your mouth one more time. He might do all of those in the same five minute span.

Almost every women I am close to has been raped or assaulted.

What part of this do you specifically not understand?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_woman_syndrome

From the little that I know:

Every abuser in my personal life whom I've learned about--most of whom I'd also met and spent time with before learning of their deeds--are extremely charismatic people who make active efforts to both isolate their partner from their social circle as well as do things externally that increase their reputation amongst both their peers and the peers of their partner. The people who batter, violate, and terrorize their partners are, with unusual frequency (in my experience), the same people who pick up the tab for everyone at the bar, who reliably buy people gifts, and who offer trusted advice and counsel in trying times.

Now, as to why these abusers are like this, that's a more complex thing. I'm not qualified to speak on it, but in the examples I've seen in my life, they're often people who have narcissistic personality disorder, where they're extremely attached to being seen in favorable lights by those around them, and as a result, react viciously to those who challenge that (oft fictitious) image. (This isn't always a conscious process--to put yourself into their shoes, imagine you're inextricably convinced that everyone is trying to defame you, abuse you, and tarnish your reputation at all times (which is probably true for the abuser, because in trying to prevent such fiction, they do monstrous things that fulfill that exact prophecy), so you need to constantly prevent it from happening by becoming trusted and loved by every means necessary, or else.) However, in an effort to maintain this image, they become very well-regarded by those around them, which makes the victim of their abuse sound insane when they try to call them out.

These people also frequently attach high-value people (such as the children they have with the abused) to them so that they are more difficult to harm, hold accountable, or separate from. I have never, ever heard of an abuser who didn't actively maintain an external factor that made them incredibly difficult to prosecute ("but he has kids, and the kids adore him" / "but he donates so much of his time and money to local charities" / "but he's putting X through college", etc). Putting the abused OR people the abused cares about in financial dependence with them (paying for school / rent / resources for them or their lives ones, isolating the abused from avenues to financial independence, etc) is also very common, if the abuser has such resources. Then, the abused trying to get help is made to become someone who's trying to "defame" the abuser, "rob" their loved ones of financial assistance that they depend on, "steal" the children from their father "whom the kids so love". In the abuser's mind, if their being imprisoned means someone is immediately put in harm's way by their absence, they are safe.

The opportunities for the abused to be made to feel completely insane by the world the abuser has created around them are innumerable; the goal of the abuser is to make the victim sound like a monster for trying to challenge the abuser's authority, and usually, by the time the abused catches on to the situation they're now in (during which time the abuser has been nothing but sweet and caring), the abuser has already completed the process, and that world now has extreme consequences if the abused tries to escape it. They're no longer leaving their partner--they're leaving their entire family, their friends, their finances, their entire support network, because the abuser has ingrained themselves into all of it, and done all they can to make their authority unchallengeable (or, at least, convinced the abused of such).

Combine that with the abuser very often making a habit of encouraging the abused to doubt their own judgment, telling them they're stupid or worthless (in words subtle enough that you or I would believe them), or finding people from the get go who already lack such confidence (which the abuser may not even realize is what they're doing--they're just looking for someone who doesn't seem like a threat to them, while simultaneously being incapable of believing that they, themselves, might be that threat, as a result of being blinded by their own narcissism. Which is another factor--how do you convince someone they're being harmful when they're incapable of believing that they have the capacity to harm? The abusers often believe the same lies they tell their victims, and tell them with unwavering conviction.)

Do you have anyone in your life who you hold in very high esteem, whom you are very close to, who you've also heard ill of? When has your gut response been to believe the person speaking ill of them, instead of your trusted, caring, friend, who you've known for years, who would "never do such a thing"? It might be someone so close to you that believing their victim would feel like buying into a conspiracy theory--which is exactly the circumstance that the abuser is trying to maintain.

That's a big part of why.

> I just don't understand it.

Hi! Welcome to the Internet! This is clearly your first time here.

So, anyway, there is a site called Google. It's fairly good with things like this and will give you a lot of information. It's a well-studied phenomenon with a LOT of literature, and it's been written about quite a bit in modern times.

You can go here and start your journey on understanding.

https://www.google.com/search?q=why+do+victims+stay+with+the...

Congrats on being one of today's lucky 10,000!

(https://xkcd.com/1053/)

It turns out that rapists like to enter relationships with damaged people, and damaged people have trouble leaving violently abusive relationships. I know understanding isn't a strength of yours, but hopefully this helps.

>nor am I blaming anyone

Saying this doesn't immunize you from valid criticism of victim-blaming. Your question is basically "Why would the victim let it happen again?". I know you're "just asking questions", but we all get the message you are sending here.

Money.

Usually the lawsuits start when the money is more likely to come from that, than from enabling the behavior.

It seems that when you can have anything money could buy, you start to look at the things money can't buy.

It's a common issue. When you got everything you could possibly want in life or have enough money to buy whatever you want... then for quite a lot of people of either gender, the illegal and illicit becomes the next thing to obtain.

For some, it's an increasingly worrisome amount (and type of) drugs, for others, it's women, and for a select few it's children.

Please list all the reasons you don't believe her.

>I dunno I'm on some forums with normal older people and they're much more likely to post AI content from YouTube or paste "I asked AI" quotes from chatgpt or even post their own "prompted GAI illustrations" as one guy put it.

No, old people just don't bother hiding it, even though they use it less.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/25/34-of-us-...

I'm sure VPs are sweating bullets over the instructions they will receive during the part of the shareholder's call where mutual fund managers dial their members and hold the phones up to each other.

By that definition anything that happens in politics or corporate america is "fervently pushed by people over 55", because that's the group with the most political and economic power. AI push? Boomers. Datacenter backlash? Boomers. ESG push? Boomers. ESG backlash? Boomers.

Yes, as an oldster I’m constantly on the phone with mutual fund managers expressing my desire for CEOs to push more AI. :eyeroll:

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to conspiring with my fellow seniors to keep house prices up in my local area.

> In the US we have a problem that a lot of seniors can't afford to retire.

Gen Z and majority of millennials are completely unsympathetic to this problem.

From their perspective, older generations have actively hindered their careers and financial opportunities to the point where they know they'll have to work their entire lives. They also know the US is marching towards financial calamity when Medicare becomes insolvent in the early 2030s, and don't anticipate Medicare or Social Security to exist when they're older.

A lot of the cultural changes that were achieved are actively being fought against and are slowly being reversed. Seems like every few weeks there is something from the civil rights era being chipped away at.

I grew up in the 90s in Europe. Back then Europe had strong consumer protection, pretty strong worker protection, low entry jobs still payed a bunch, cheap housing (my single parent mom was able to buy a flat while working at a gas station at the age of 23).

Today’s Europe is nothing but austerity, there is no consumer protection left, they’ve split the society by having “jobs that only immigrants want” (i.e. insultingly low paying jobs), nobody can buy a flat anymore unless they’re a 10 year senior at a tech company.

Today’s Europe is exactly the kind of world I always imagine the 1970s to be like. The only exception is in the 1970s Europe had a strong communist or socialist opposition which actively fought for a better world with strikes every week (or at least that is how I read European history).

As one who isn't a musician but loves listening to music, the emergence of passable genAI-generated music means that I can't trust new music anymore.

The only new music I'm willing to buy is music that I've seen the artists perform live, or is from established artists that I know and trust are keeping it human.

I have no idea how rare or common my perspective on this is, but it's not impossible that the music industry may see a decline as a result.

"jazz is music; swing is business" - Duke Ellington

So the music industry could go hard into AI or whatever the business folks deem appropriate, with various consequences, while the musicians will continue to music and who knows maybe the rent will be covered.

The most jarring thing for me is that artists tend to be the most "communally oriented, socially forward" group of people. I've definitely spent my fair time around them.

As soon as tools came about that socialized their skill, opened it to everyone, they immediately and violently opposed it. Which is totally understandable, except when your core ideology you have been pushing for your whole life is to socialize everything.

The hypocrisy is so suffocating that it was like a 9.0 earthquake in my moral landscape.

And yes, before you come at my throat, free local image generation tools get no hatred exemption.

> - people don't actually like music like you, and just want content; non-stop content.

This is the big thing that artists are going through right now.

They're realizing that most consumers of art don't care about the process or the artist. They just want music as background noise, or an aesthetically pleasing picture on their wall.

I wanted to listen to heavy metal songs about office life. I'm not going to spend years learning how to play guitar in order to record it, not to mention that I have a voice fit for old school silent movies. I'm certainly not going to spend money on commissioning a song. But 5 minutes in ChatGPT to write and refine some lyrics, followed by 15 minutes in Suno playing with various prompts, and eventually I got "Per My Last Email"[0], and I was happy.

Let the musicians rage against my shortcut. I don't care. Let them rage against some notion of "quality" and how AI doesn't provide it. Don't care, it's good enough for me.

[0] https://youtu.be/ZVia46yAoMU

Yep. In theory, labor saving innovation (or handing jobs off overseas) should be a joyous occasional all. It could be a joyous occasion for all. But we have structured it so that, the moment it happens, 200% of the benefits go to capital and -100% go to labor -- and the consolation prize for labor is that maybe some of the 200% will trickle down into a different job later, or willingness to spend on overpriced haircuts, or something.

There's an argument to be made that this is a necessary component of an economy that can reinvent itself. Maybe. But even if we accept this convenient and self-serving and suspicious premise, there can then be no concession on the point that structuring it this way creates an obligation on the part of the person receiving 200% to "spread it around" and that attempts to dodge this obligation are morally repugnant, socially unacceptable, and ought to be met with harsh political backpressure.

For the last while, that hasn't been the thinking. Instead we have gone for "blame mexicans and let's see if we can't make it 300%!" The response of the kids gives me hope that people might be coming back to their senses on the matter.

Somehow, wages tend to go up, though:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Innovation can make specific skills obsolete; but only if the output of the process actually gets cheaper or better...

It results in the output becoming available to people at a lower price point.

It's not some artificial social system like unions guilds or cartels, it's a tangible thing that actually produces more output with less (or different) workers.

> It's not like your gradual transition from sequencing with gels to using supercomputers over the long course of a career.

this. I don't understand why people here are pretending like its not a big deal.

You're right. Ali Alkhatib believes that AI is a political project intended to shift power and agency away from individuals and organizations and toward centralized power structures. Now, ordinary people must figure out a way forward, because they have fewer and fewer cards to play.

> AI represents the ultimate dream of the capitalist: the elimination of the need of human labor entirely

Decreasing human toil for the same level of production should be the dream of _everyone_. If it's only capitalists in favor then that's a massive indictment of the non-capitalists.

This reminds me of the famous Bastiat quote: "If, then, the utility of any branch of industry is to be estimated not by the amount of satisfactions it is fitted to procure us with a determinate amount of labour, but, on the contrary, by the amount of labour which it exacts in order to yield us a determinate amount of satisfactions, what we ought evidently to desire is, that each acre of land should yield less corn, and each grain of corn less nourishment…"

The misunderstanding that labor and not production is the basis of prosperity leads to some pretty silly conclusions.

Do you seriously think everybody is a programmer now that we have AI? Or that we don't need programmers anymore?

The tools are just changing. But everything is always changing.

Again: Sure they have much to boo about, but AI? Gen AI can run on your own machine even, you can fully own the means to your production. How is this wasting the time they spent studying? You still need knowledge and understanding of a field to be active in it. When the tools change your internal "world model" is not suddenly corrupt. I hope these kids were taught how to think, not what to think.

It helps that research assignments have a certain amount of people-power available, to which amplifiers increase the work done. Many businesses have a certain amount of work to be done, so amplifiers reduce the people needed.

That's not even accounting for AI's unique ability to trick CEOs.

in contrast with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kids_Aren%27t_Alright

Other than the TikTok-headed part, the phrase could easily be applied to at least as far back as the 80s (NES) depending on definition of game-playing. Before then, there was foosball and pinball. Nevermind the kids that play card/board games. Also, while not staring at a phone implying smart phone use, it was often said about teens having a phone growing out of the shoulder from them constantly being on the phone with friends.

So, yeah, kids these days...are just like the generations of kids before them.

Most people will experience it as sludge, if they experience it at all. Countries that do not aggressively regulate AI out will see our already profoundly eroded customer service ecosystem disintegrate completely. The already opaque and awful systems that determine things like access to credit or access to healthcare will become even more opaque and inscrutable and produce measurably worse outcomes for actual humans.

This is kinda obvious to most people, who are already experiencing an enormous amount of sludge in their daily life.

Tech-bro optimism in the face of GenAI is so painfully decoupled from lived reality it's frightening. Tech has not made the world a better place for most people over the last fifteen years, and it is poised to make things much, much worse.

For what it's worth, you're probably downvoted way more for the whole "woe is me, I'm always downvoted for being right by people who are wrong" false martyrdom routine. Maybe leave that part off your post next time: it only detracts from the rest of it.

You might also refrain from generalizations like "hn is firmly inside the tech/business world". HN is not a single person, there are a variety of people here with a variety of experiences and opinions and biases.

What's this have to do with the thread you replied to?

And... anyway... Google just changed its homepage to make "AI Mode" / LLM responses the norm. LLM usage is just going to be the norm for the foreseeable future. Doesn't matter if a wary set of "laypeople" are reticent. They're still going to ask Google questions and be affected by it in their digital lives.

did you have a real estate developer come and visit your school and talk about how the surging house prices were really helpful for them

I think this is just it being blatant. it doesn't necessarily mean anything will come of it but of course tensions will be high if you get an ai pitch instead of a congratulation speech

i want them to do the atlas shrugged thing so bad. it would end so funny.

Who do you imagine the winners and losers will be? To the extent AI is useful and disruptive, it's best utilized by people with capital. Which is to say, the winners are few and the losers are everybody else. In this case, the losers aren't just more vocal, they're louder and more visible because they're much more numerous.

Who are the winners? Where's the profitable billion dollar industry?

I can be pressured to use it at work to keep up with others who use it, while simultaneously knowing that it is eroding and devaluing my skills, and wishing that we could all stop using it together.

The word "Luddite" is no longer such an insult as it once was, by the way, now that everyone realises they had a point.

It's a skit from the show "I think you should leave". Generally absurdist skit comedy.

Apologies. Did not intend to advocate, but I will be more considerate of language in the future.

China? A New York Times article reports that a Chinese court has ruled that layoffs justified by AI are illegal. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/china-ai-unemplo...

> It is one and the same. Wrong. I have a hugely negative opinion on cars that I express often. Still, I think streets should be complete, and roads built for all modes of travel, and more restrictive laws on car use.

> Is that a threat? No. Do you feel threatened? Rest assured, you won't be the billionaire and I won't be a part of the mob, but I'm warning that is what will happen when ordinary people are pushed too far. China taking over the country would be a massive improvement, but they're going to do that by prompting, "Chat take over the US"? Unlikely.

> The people should be asking for basic assistance benefits You have resigned your agency as a free human being. We are just a bunch of humans on earth. If we all decided AI was bad enough we could ban it. The people don't want basic assistance, they want a say in the direction of their lives. At the moment, their lives are being directed by billionaires and those who saw a fancy chatbot and decided to willingly become a serf.

When you say China taking over do you mean economically? And how does this scenario play out?

are you proud of being old and not being able to emphasize with the younger generations?

I feel like I see this a lot. oh I'm so old bla bla bla I don't get this oh I have no idea why xyz...

if you're young right now, your future seems to be certainly fucked.

do you think the youth is going to be all upstraight and say "take the bull by its horns!" as they give up any hope of owning a house or having a family?

but I guess they are "fucked in the head". they should be appreciating the S&P500 all time highs on their 401ks... oh right, they're not part of the gravy train. whoopsie

Did you expect them to cheer on a billionaire that had a direct hand in fucking up their future? In this case the hate is rational if you ask me, and I’m a late millennial.