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by dakiol 35 days ago
People are not idiots. AI benefits only the ones at the top of the chain, and the 10% of the rest of us. Are you in the top 10%? No, you typically are in the bottom 90%. So we don't want AI, we don't want the top getting richer at our expenses. We just want a job to bring bread home and keeping pushing our store while being "happy". You take that away from us, just so you can double your net worth, and well, bad things will start to happen
2 comments

Yeah. So many people drinking the cool-aid dreaming oneself to be the 10%.
A lot of people in tech are probably in the 10%. But, the real problem is that AI doesn't even really help those in the top 10%. Maybe just barely, if you already accumulated your wealth. It's really closer to the top 5% who won't be particularly negatively affected.
Kinda top 0.1%, and all those who are directly integrating AI into the companies' workflow, so that they get richer temporarily.
> "Are you in the top 10%?"

The answer is obviously yes for the majority of HN readers. Hacker News is a site maintained by a huge venture capital fund for startup founders and employees and other venture capitalists plus a lot employees of FAANG and other big tech. You are preaching against the 10% to the 10%.

Definitely not the majority. Looking at the US, which is probably home to the most users of this website, the threshold for top 10% net worth is at $1.8m, and the threshold for top 10% income is $210k. There's many rich people like that here, but I think the average person is just a standard tech worker, maybe a senior, but not someone from a top company. They're overrepresented here, no doubt about that, but most people just aspire to be in the top 10% and defend the rich and ultra-rich because they dream of being just like them one day.
I'm choosing not to use wealth because wealth is a function of both time and income. Not everybody on Hacker News is the same age so it's hard to normalize; someone might reach that threshold if they were elderly even if their income was modest. I would understand if you disagreed though.

I think your value for income is for household income, not for individual income. My quick Google of top 10% individual income for the U.S. says it's $155k, which is well within the range of incomes for senior developers and other techies in the major metros even outside the tech hubs.

>You are preaching against the 10% to the 10% [as one of the top 10%].

A staple of progressive tradition.