Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It's Almost Hard to Believe

I'm not that young anymore but when I hear Dario Amodei speak and gesticulate enthusiastically about how AI will soon make my job redundant, from a positio of someone who can retire now and who benefits from AI possibly replacing workers, it's very hard to like him.

How oblivious are people to the world that they think this is somehow strange or hard to believe? Why would they like any of the tech CEOs, or CEOs in general?

It's hard to see why basically anyone would at this point.

I heard my 12yo uses "AI" as a synonym for crap in a context which had nothing to do with machine learning. There is a pronounced and growing disconnect between the fervently pro-AI messaging on platforms like HN and regular people. Anti-AI sentiment goes deep and has momentum. A few billion dollars of marketing and influencer spend isn't going to turn it around. When the bubble deflates as most people feel it must I think it will only reinforce the negativity.

I wonder how much of this is caused by income inequality. There are some young people I talk to that are genuinely worried about whether AI will take all the jobs. But there are a lot more that rightfully realize that they probably can't afford the middle class life their parents had and are annoyed at all the money AI is hoovering up and how rich these CEOs are. And that's the surface level. There's all sorts of resentment that hasn't really been thought through and wouldn't exist if we had the sort of real growth in lower- and middle-class incomes that we used to.

What's so surprising? The AI CEOs hate them and are trying to destroy the world they live in along with their job prospects.

As a young person, the data I would like to see on this topic are how AI/tech CEOs compare to CEOs on other industries. I would be surprised if Nadella polled significantly lower than the median non-tech CEO, based on gen Z's opinion of CEOs.

Blaming a tough job market on AI, and claiming AI pivots are the reasons for layoffs, while claiming AI can destroy humanity.

Who could have seen this coming?

“Hate” for “Don’t trust” seems like a pure clickbait material

The young people are probably on to something. They are the future after all.

These popularity contests are won and lost based on marketing content on TikTok. If the opinions of young people were relevant they'd be appropriately shifted on demand. Few of them are reasoned positions so they can be shifted one way or the other with targeted advertising.

The title is wrong: it is easy to believe.

Technology is not cool anymore.

This makes me think of last year when Adobe made a Bluesky account and got shouted off the platform within a day for no other reason than Adobe sucks. I have hope that it signals a trend that certain audiences are simply starting to exercise taste.

Are there any CEOs people do trust? (I wonder how it compares if someone made a list of politicians)

this seems to be the list:

  65% Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
  70% Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg
  70% Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
  70% OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
  70% SpaceX CEO Elon Musk
  75% Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai
  75% Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei
  79% Palantir Chairman Peter Thiel
  81% Palantir CEO Alex Karp

More likely it's the politicians and lawyers etc. that are afraid of AI empowering the peasant class, so they're telling the commoners to divert their angst against AI.

Oh AI will take our jobs..? LET IT!!

Who wants to work all your life and still not be able to afford a house?

Instead of asking to be wage slaves your entire lives, demand your politicians to give you UBI.

The Butlerian Jihad is coming. It will happen sooner than we think. It will start with Australia, where the popular vote matters the most for political power. “Vote for the Greens! We’ll ban AI! We’ll bring your jobs back! Your savings account will earn interest again! The AI scams will stop!” All false promises, of course. The laws will be pathetic: “Prohibited digital intelligence — any digital system capable of learning, adapting, remembering, recalling, generating, or interpreting information of a textual, visual, audio, interactive or other form.” It will be the Minister’s choice regarding which companies are in the (new) enforcement agency’s crosshairs. Misunderstood situations (like a Tesla running over a child that it didn’t detect) will be used as the war cry. “AI is dangerous! AI cannot be trusted! AI is being used by criminals!”

I hope my prediction is wrong.

not really difficult. Genocide is a rather niche thing to like, and supporting it puts you in lockstep with those perpetrating.

Young people don't know who AI CEOs are without the media apparatus teaching them AI is bad.

I've watched journalists dunk on this tech since the days of Tacotron. They love to dish out hate and venom and crystalize it around concepts that are easy to sell.

Not that the Dario and Sam haven't both been deliberately hyperbolic and made themselves easy targets, but the media was always attempting to do this.

Journalists hate AI and they always have.

We've seen them try dozens, if not hundreds of things to get the story to stick. Lately it's data centers being built and the stories of neighbors complaining about noise.

As much as I blame Sam for getting people angry at him, journalists also contributed to radicalizing people against him and turning him into an assassination target.

This headline is literally trying to reinforce this.

I doubt any of the cited CEOs will care. “And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake I shake it off, I shake it off (whoo-hoo-hoo)” - Taylor Swift.

Automation is such an old concept invented back in the 1st century AD. Furthermore, I don't see people hating the CEOs of Siemens, Honeywell, Schneider Electric, ABB, Yokogawa, Emerson, Allen Bradley, GE Fanuc, Kuka, Hyundia, Mitsubishi etc. They've been automating entire industries & manufacturing with their controllers (PLCs, DCS etc), SCADA, HMI & systems for decades. The first PLC was invented by General Motors back in 1968. China has entire dark factories making phones and their electric cars. The media is only crying now because their cushy office, journalism and art jobs are slowly going away.