[narrator]

Sounds like Twitter pre-Elon where 80% are woke commissars and 20% actually make the site go. That's a big pattern these days where a small group of people make everything work and generate enormous wealth then you have this huge overhang of people who find some sort of way to hang on to them by inventing and enforcing ideological purity contests.

Yuval Harari wonders what we'll do with people made useless by AI. They will be activists directed by AI generated propaganda campaigns to force all the people the AI doesn't control to comply.

Yup, that's the future with AI. You have a few AI researchers that program the robots and everyone else is crusading for justice and working in compliance. There jobs consist of inventing new things to be offended about and enforcing new rules to prevent their feelings from being hurt though everything they believe comes from AI generated propaganda campaigns.

Same thing happens at colleges were you got like $20 million spent on salaries for senior DEI person in charge of putting tampons in men's bathrooms and such whose job mainly consists of going to meetings and finding things to be offended about[1].

[1]https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careers/virginia-taxpayers-a...

[harkinian]

I highly doubt those 80% were working on ideological stuff. It's common in big tech companies to have too many cooks in the kitchen, and because the design process and tech stack tends to mimic an org chart, stuff gets semi-permanently more complicated as a result. There are also some teams doing projects/research that wouldn't normally make a lot of sense, but the interest rates were so low at times that companies had to stretch to do more random things.

Sometimes after a change of ownership, they cut whatever they consider fat. This is Broadcom's strategy for example, acquire and cut.

[hef19898]

Well, looking at the value of Twitter pre- and post acquisition, those 80% did do things that provided some positive value for the company.

[weberer]

You're forgetting the one thing that sets Reddit apart. They get crazy people to perform moderation tasks for free. It turns out that a lot of people don't ask for a paycheck as long as you let them push their ideology on an entire subreddit.

[archagon]

> Sounds like Twitter pre-Elon where 80% are woke commissars and 20% actually make the site go.

You seriously think 80% of Twitter was “woke commissars”?

[thecrash]

It's a fun speculative fiction premise but assumes that everyone else's feelings and grievances are the result of AI manipulation while your own feelings and grievances are authentic[1].

[1]https://xkcd.com/610/

[narrator]

The way to counteract AI influence is to view the world as Bayesian and incorporate many different opposing views. I read both Russian and Western views of the Ukraine war on Telegram channels for example that regularly contradict each other. When I start reading something and I experience cringe, I view that as a positive signal that I'm getting information from a different perspective that I should evaluate and update my priors.

[insane_dreamer]

as opposed to the Elon-era where 95% is the Dear Leader Commissar and 5% actually make the site go