Silicon Valley is in denial in face of widespread backlash

atriarch

This is a multifaceted problem for sure. As the fruit of leveraging LLM use, from my experience, is held in the hands of experienced, skilled, and gray-haired workers, what hope do young kids today have of BEING in this world? The economic model since the industrial revolution is approaching it's metamorphosis: robotic servants that can do everything for everyone. Who, in that world, can spend the fiat and for what? I think many humans would prefer going back to picking potatoes out of the ground for a bit of silver than to lose agency to the machine. Everyone else is either bunker prepping or plugging into the matrix. Will we arrive at the Jetsons? Or Warhammer 40k?

panny

I'm puzzled how people who didn't care about Snowden are suddenly very upset about Flock. I'm glad they finally decided the 4A is important.

red_admiral

Something I never thought would happen: ultra-conservative Moms For Liberty and progressive education campaigners agree on something. Namely "get that AI out of our schools". The Butlerian Jihad has started.

sergiotapia

I thought this was going to be about h1b and the severe backlash ycombinator partners are facing online.

Zsfe510asG

SV is also in denial that AI is the final straw that makes people leave the Internet.

cocacola1

The industry needs messengers that can put out a positive vision that also aren’t creepy or skeezy seeming dudes. I don’t think Zuck’s WSJ manifesto convinced anyone, plus he’s a terrible messenger.

simianwords

If any one follows culture wars, they'd know that a widespread and mostly crude backlash like this will inevitably trigger the correction and the correction will have a stronger inertia. You must never play your hand like this or you risk being dunked on for your excessiveness. 2020's woke was like this btw.

imglorp

For one thing, saying the quiet part out loud takes the covers off: https://www.artisan.co/blog/stop-hiring-humans For another, apply AI where it's good but stop forcing it where it doesn't belong. Ask the users, they know.

ilamont

When the bubble bursts and tens of millions of people see their retirement accounts with S&P holdings drop 30%, that's when the knives will really come out.

dmix

Vibecoding meets the long history of viberegulation

ogou

I don't think they are in denial. I think they just don't care about public sentiment. American capitalism has proven over and over that people who hate you will still buy your product, at a premium.

miiiiiike

My family keeps sending me screenshots of AI generated arguments against building new data centers. Apparently we have too many and they don't understand where the demand is coming from. When I asked how many we'll need over the next 10 years the answer was simple, we'll need to build exactly "Oh, fuck off." data centers in the US over the next 10 years to meet expected demand. We should get on that. I guess video games are a problem too. And social media. They wrote about it on their Facebook Group. The news one, the one where they repost TikToks of people pointing and nodding at another video where someone in a trucker hat is talking about a conspiracy theory, not the one where they talk about Candy Crush. I don’t use AI. Nothing about these conversations makes sense.

tescreal

If they're in denial, perhaps they see something bigger at play? Governments are likely very interested in the massive-scale capacities for monitoring and analysis these tools enable. The public might not even matter to the suits in the end.

1000100_1000101

I thought a big part of the opposition to data centers was due to the massive spike in electricity costs, or even loss of availability in getting power, for regular people while the data center gets a deal. If they actually paid for the new power generation, I doubt there would be much backlash. That it's likely to be used to mine your personal data and be used to create AI slop in exchange for more global warming are just reasons to hate it more, but I think it's not the primary hate point.

phendrenad2

> the backlash to data centers, Flock and AI glasses It seems reasonable that these three things are part of ONE "backlash", but I don't believe they are. I think these are three separate issues with three different, mostly overlapping, groups of people who are giving "backlash". Data centers themselves are subject to two different sources of b-lash. There are people who heard that datacenters use up "all the water". Then there are people who are broadly anti-AI because they don't want to lose their job (and home, and health insurance, and live under a bridge with all the other displaced people). The backlash against Flock is predictable and unfortunate. Well, we defunded the police, and let political axe-grinders fill our DA seats with hyper-progressive activists. "Just put up cameras, it worked in the UK!" seems like the natural move, but it was a trap. People want to feel safe, and don't want to be spied on. We're going to have to have a functioning justice system at some point, aren't we? The backlash against AI glasses is more visceral, more primal. People get shy on camera, so making everyone be potentially on camera at all times, or random times, is fueling a kind of anxiety that isn't going to just go away. hey, we've been here before, with google glass. Google was smart enough to discontinue it immediately.

leonidasrup

Of course Silicon Valley is in denial, when their bonuses depend on AI. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

goldenarm

My relatives and friends are fed up with enshittification and hostile tech, some are about to stop using tech entirely. Big tech is too short-termist to realize it, but we are about to destroy a lot of economical value if we destroy the internet and the trust behind it.

_fat_santa

When it comes to the AI backlash, I think a big problem is that we have absolute terrible messengers and they are spreading terrible messages. If I go on X, the vibe there around AI is amazing. You have folks constantly talking about cool things that they get their agents to do. Agents can help you make things you didn't have the knowhow to make, teach you things at a level that you couldn't get just by searching Google and take care of the boring parts of your life so you can spend more time doing the things you care about. Overall things are very positive and makes you excited for the future. Contrast that with the public comments by AI executives. Pretty much all of the messages fall flat at best or are just outright doomery at worst. It's such a stark contrast and while I'm personally really excited for the future, I can totally see how someone who isn't plugged into that world to get a very grim view of the future. And even when they run ads about AI, it's always the worst examples (thinking of that Gemini ad that talked about writing a letter to your family with AI). I really wish the industry could have a better messenger around this stuff. Don't talk about how it can help you do stuff you already know how to do, run an ad about how it can enable you to do stuff you couldn't do before. I think the best example of this is a bike mechanic fixing a Reevo bike and writing firmware using Claude Code so it no longer required an app to work[1]. The author outright said he didn't know how to code or do anything in that area but was able to figure it out with the help of AI. I think a message like that around AI is awesome but no all we hear about is how AI will take your job. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPrtVGimBYs

0gs

you know, ascribing states of mind like denial to entities like "Silicon Valley" is almost as bad as ascribing consciousness LLMs

insane_dreamer

> One of the big stories of the last decade plus has of course been the story of rising inequality, and of working class Americans becoming economically and politically disempowered. What serves as a better totem to this sentiment better than a megaproject erected under the cover of a panoply of NDAs to build a mass job automator for a trillion-dollar tech company? The sad thing is, tech is supposed to be about solving problems to make people's lives better. But instead of investing $$$$ in tech to solve people's problems, we're investing $$$$ to add to their problems.