Discussion
I’m glad they’re putting this in the spotlight, really glad, but Mother Jones absolutely biffed something here, something a lot of folks are getting wrong:
The quote about how AI is “the largest theft of labor in human history?” That’s not “how tech leaders talk when they think no one is listening.”
No no no. •That• is the kind of email you send when you think the company is doing something terrible, and you want your objections preserved in writing. 🧵
2. There’s a lot more internal opposition inside the house of the tech giants than you might think, even at the upper-middle power levels of the biggest companies. One of the highest priorities of the trillion-dollar AI marketing blitz has been to create the illusion of consensus and inevitability: “all the tech people, all the smart people, •they• all agree. Who are you to stop it, you lowly tech employee, you ignorant city council member, you effete academic, you ignorant peon?” But it’s smoke and mirrors and noise. There is neither consensus nor inevitability.
If we want to oppose this destructive AI bubble, we should understand that we have friends everywhere.
/end
@inthehands Out of curiosity, have you met Hecht? (He was at UMN/GroupLens for a while.)
Yes. I don’t know him well at all, but I know enough of him to guess at his mindset. That’s part of why I think his motivation here was documenting his objections and not gloating.
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My quibble matters for two reasons:
1. The way that the AI-pushing tech leaders like Sam Altman and Elon Musk and Satya Nadella actually talk when they think no one is listening is AFAICT completely different from that Hecht quote. They are delusional, megalomaniacal. They wouldn’t gloat about getting away with labor theft; the concept of “labor theft” does not even exist for them. How can it be theft when they deserved it, when they are messianic figures whose wealth is proof of their infallible rightness?
If we want to oppose this destructive AI bubble, we should understand what we’re opposing.
2/