[nemomarx]

With all the money floating around in tech you'd think PR would be solveable. But you still have AI founders going out in public and saying they want to get rid of jobs instead of some pitch about how easy work will get or you'll be happier or etc. Why?

[muvlon]

Why? Because their messaging is not addressing the general public, but their investors. And they've realized that their investors are really receptive to panic-baiting (we'll get rid of jobs, ASI is right around the corner, p(doom) = 25% etc).

[whilenot-dev]

This doesn't answer GPs question, though: Why is a panic-baiting "we'll get rid of jobs" better than some gain-baiting "we'll make your workforce 10x more productive"? Why is panic a better response to investors than gain?

We got:

- A: "AI helps in automating tedious tasks"

- B: "Your workforce can be more motivated and productive"

- C: "You can do more with fewer people"

Why not advertise A → B, stop there and let their customers do the reasoning for B → C themselves? Why go straight to a hyperbolic A → C and swallow all the hate that comes with it?

My own presumption is that we got that strange fetish for optimization (C) and just don't trust our own ambitions to make the potential gain in productivity (B) work any other way.

[watwut]

It goes back to Warren Buffett quote "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." That is what it is. I thought it was just funny but wrong comment, but lately realized Buffett was 100% right all along.

[bobmarleybiceps]

Panic just makes it sound more real, I think. They were saying stuff like "Eek, our technology is TOO dangerous and advanced and we need to be regulated :-O" when they definitely didn't actually want to be regulated. ("They" meaning at least Sam Altman).

"Your workforce will be more productive" sounds much less impressive than "OMG you will literally not need employees anymore!! 10x profits!!"

[coolThingsFirst]

Because it's being sold off as the terminal technology and if you aren't in on the final and ultimate technological innovation you will be for forever behind and never catch up.

[zombot]

Panic switches off the rational part of your brain and makes you act without thinking. Better for anyone who wants to manipulate you.

[ben_w]

> But you still have AI founders going out in public and saying they want to get rid of jobs instead of some pitch about how easy work will get or you'll be happier or etc. Why?

Even if they did, would you believe them? Here's Zuckerberg on how he sees "Personal Superintelligence": https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/

Compare that to the $1.4 trillion lawsuit now in the news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48817682

Or compare Musk's promises to what's delivered. His self-driving timelines has its own Wikipedia page; how much he opined DOGE could save could be falsified by the top-level breakdown of the US federal budget. He used to be worried about AI, "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon", now he's saying he wants more Tesla shares for the "robot army" which his SpaceX presentations say will be a billion* strong.

* though if you just naïvely apply the numbers here, that factory will also be "on fire": https://www.terafab.ai

[watwut]

It is not PR issue. AI founders in fact do want to get rid of jobs and create permanent underclass. That is their actual real goal. Better PR would make people realize it later, but that it is. And whether we realize it or not does not matter. Tech CEOs they already captured so much power, that it does not matter what "masses" think, feel or whether they suffer.

AI founders are OK with people hating them, because people truly absolutely dont matter.

[geraneum]

It’s because they don’t pitch to the users. They pitch to the investors. Have noticed how everyone and their dog now has an “AI story” on their website? Yeah, because they won’t get funding otherwise. And these are not even the AI companies!

[pixl97]

It's just what happens when money becomes completely disconnected from making useful things people want. If you get bought by a trillion dollar company you win, everyone else is just expected to lose.

[adaml_623]

Because they are selfish and would prefer to make millions selling to big companies who want to pay less for labour.

[disgruntledphd2]

I mean, to be fair, basically the only way to raise the amount of capital required to keep growing LLMs was to sell a story at this scale.

I think the real error was the notion that they could sell this story to investors without the rest of the population noticing.

[muvlon]

Is it an error though? The general public has noticed, everyone hates their guts but investment is still flowing.

[disgruntledphd2]

If they end up getting heavily regulated, then it's definitely an error. The Fable export controls kerfuffle was definitely downstream of all the hype so it seems to be having some impact.

[andor]

They live in a bubble and don’t understand that getting rid of jobs is not universally seen as a good thing.

If you haven’t read it already, I can recommend “Careless People”, this is a constant theme in the book.

[ymolodtsov]

Few founders do this and the ones who do are solving their own problems. For Anthropic it's primarily hiring.

But as a PR person I can guarantee you it's not possible to go around such perception shifts through money alone.

[jordanb]

"Get rid of jobs" was a pitch to investors. They needed a new trillion dollar idea. For it to be worth a trillion dollars it has to take a trillion dollars from somewhere. They looked at the economy and decided the only place it could come from is white collar payroll.

Unfortunately for them more than just the investors were paying attention to the pitch. So now they are trying to say "of course it won't unemploy people (wink) it may even create more jobs (snicker)."

[ben_w]

> For it to be worth a trillion dollars it has to take a trillion dollars from somewhere.

Musk's SpaceX TAM is roughly as you say, it's "subsume all currently existing desk jobs", which makes it simultaneously absurdly over-confident in the short term and treating this all as a zero-sum game where those jobs just go away and no new (potentially also automatable) jobs get invented, which in turn says he doesn't think anywhere is going to shift from primary and secondary economies to tertiary economies.

Zuckerberg may be full of himself, but does at least (pay someone else to?) write a vision that at least has growth-sounding phrases in it: https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/

[SecretDreams]

> go around such perception shifts through money alone.

Have the people with money considered doing more charitable acts/events for the people with less money to demonstrate that the tech industry isn't just here to extract wealth from the poor/many and transfer it to rich/few?

[sseagull]

I don’t know how much it has ever been true, but it feels like today’s wealthy, especially in tech, have completely abandoned “noblesse oblige” - fulfilling social responsibilities that their wealth should bring them.

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

[pixl97]

Hey man, Greed is Good, right?

[OtherShrezzing]

> to demonstrate that the tech industry isn't just here to extract wealth from the poor/many and transfer it to rich/few?

I think the problem is that the tech industry in large is just here to extract wealth from the many and transfer it to the few. That's why it's focused on scale.

People aren't dumb, and most of the time they can see when they're on the receiving end of an extractive relationship - even if there's lots of PR work going on to hide that reality from them.

[tqi]

I think the real question is, if the big tech companies are so all knowing and all powerful, with so much control over media and messaging, then why is their PR so bad?

[red-iron-pine]

sociopaths talking to other sociopaths.

they're not pitching to the average person, they're talking to C-levels, private equity, other ruthless billionaires, etc.

and when you have a solution that will eliminate the workers, why do you care about lying to the workers? instead of being lambasted about being blunt and evil you'll be lambasted about being duplicitous and evil