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.
Lets suppose everyone in the world miraculously loses their jobs to AI, who is paying for it? How? What are they selling? What stops the rest of humanity from turning data centers into a pile of ash?
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.
A lot of tech recently has just made things worse.
Uber made the taxi experience way worse and less predictable.
Now, I can’t just walk out of a bar, get into a clean taxi and go home, I have to fiddle with an app, wait, wave trying to identify “my” ride, then hope it’s clean and safe. It’s a nightmare compared to what we had before.
Uber eats made food delivery significantly worse and more expensive.
It used to be that I could get food delivered for a known fixed price, it would arrive while still hot and it would be delivered to the door.
Now, the price is obfuscated, there’s an extra fee for getting the food warm, sometimes the drinks are spilled into the bag, delivery is to the curb so I have to go outside to get it.
There’s a lot more that has been made worse by tech companies.
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 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.
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.
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
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!”
If there will be any Butlerian Anything, it will be a reaction to the excruciatingly pathetic attempts at legislating the problem into a slightly smaller problem.
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.
A significant portion of the population didn't need journalists feeding them a negative opinion.
More people alive today are educated in computer science than ever before. The same is true of epistemology, linguistics, and broader philosophy. Many have also lived long enough to see previous waves of AI come and go.
People were already watching the topic closely over a decade ago with DeepMind, AlphaGo, etc. None of the arguments against the current AI methods are new. People were poking holes in statistical methods centuries ago.
Mainstream media just waits for the right time to pounce and attempt to sway everyone else who is uncertain or out of the loop. They actually started out with a pro-AI stance. That in no way implies the majority was ever out of the loop or believed in any of the hype. The public are not a flock of baby birds waiting for their empty minds to be fed.
The majority doesn't even care about the principle of the matter. They are far more interested in whether it actually works reliably. The appeals to emotion, political bias, or ego are wildly out of touch and outdated. What you're observing today with young people is not that they have different "opinions", but that they are burned out on all opinions. We forced them to become so much more sophisticated and discerning by pressing that button too many times. You'd be just as cynical if you spent your childhood watching an iPad deliver endless ragebait.
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.
I don't come down on anyone for failing to foresee how the web 2.0/social-media/streaming eras would evolve to be used against us more than for us. I'm as guilty as anyone. But in 2026 there's no excuse for failing to apply lessons from the last decade or two to extrapolate where AI is going.
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.
Lets suppose everyone in the world miraculously loses their jobs to AI, who is paying for it? How? What are they selling? What stops the rest of humanity from turning data centers into a pile of ash?
These people are so disconnected from reality.
Talk about shooting the messenger…
A CEO of a large AI company is hardly just a "messenger" here. Come on now.
He is just the poor little head of the snake.
He's the guy doing the thing that he is delivering the message about...
The CEO of a major AI company is not “the messenger”
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.
Sure, CEOs are rarely appreciated in general. But the anti-tech sentiment is absolutely a new and rapidly growing beast. It’s different — trust me.
A lot of tech recently has just made things worse.
Uber made the taxi experience way worse and less predictable.
Now, I can’t just walk out of a bar, get into a clean taxi and go home, I have to fiddle with an app, wait, wave trying to identify “my” ride, then hope it’s clean and safe. It’s a nightmare compared to what we had before.
Uber eats made food delivery significantly worse and more expensive.
It used to be that I could get food delivered for a known fixed price, it would arrive while still hot and it would be delivered to the door. Now, the price is obfuscated, there’s an extra fee for getting the food warm, sometimes the drinks are spilled into the bag, delivery is to the curb so I have to go outside to get it.
There’s a lot more that has been made worse by tech companies.
My experience with Uber is the opposite, FWIW.
The pace of growth of hatred is new (thanks to AI, mostly), but it's been sitting at a simmer for 20 years.
It's a crisis of trust, on that point I do find myself agreeing with Dario. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323245
edit: There are solutions to this. See link.
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 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.
What's so surprising? The AI CEOs hate them and are trying to destroy the world they live in along with their job prospects.
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.
“Hate” for “Don’t trust” seems like a pure clickbait material
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:
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.
A democratic movement leading to increased regulation, even if you think such a thing would be misguided, is hardly a jihad…
That actually sounds pretty good to me.
If there will be any Butlerian Anything, it will be a reaction to the excruciatingly pathetic attempts at legislating the problem into a slightly smaller problem.
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.
Yeah has nothing to do with all the "permanent underclass" stuff right?
Not gonna happen with open source.
And yet AI CEOs preach the “AI will take your job and you’ll be homeless” narrative so hard.
Their investment narrative, enterprise value, and potential liquidity event depends on this proclamation, regardless of how true it is.
In other words, their class interest is in conflict with the vast majority of the world.
Wonder why people can't stand them.
A significant portion of the population didn't need journalists feeding them a negative opinion.
More people alive today are educated in computer science than ever before. The same is true of epistemology, linguistics, and broader philosophy. Many have also lived long enough to see previous waves of AI come and go.
People were already watching the topic closely over a decade ago with DeepMind, AlphaGo, etc. None of the arguments against the current AI methods are new. People were poking holes in statistical methods centuries ago.
Mainstream media just waits for the right time to pounce and attempt to sway everyone else who is uncertain or out of the loop. They actually started out with a pro-AI stance. That in no way implies the majority was ever out of the loop or believed in any of the hype. The public are not a flock of baby birds waiting for their empty minds to be fed.
The majority doesn't even care about the principle of the matter. They are far more interested in whether it actually works reliably. The appeals to emotion, political bias, or ego are wildly out of touch and outdated. What you're observing today with young people is not that they have different "opinions", but that they are burned out on all opinions. We forced them to become so much more sophisticated and discerning by pressing that button too many times. You'd be just as cynical if you spent your childhood watching an iPad deliver endless ragebait.
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.
I don't think anyone is worried about a CEO's ego, lol. Society can only protect them so much in a material sense... just ask Brian Thompson.
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.
Even to whatever extent this is what's happening, a stopped clock is right twice a day applies.
I don't come down on anyone for failing to foresee how the web 2.0/social-media/streaming eras would evolve to be used against us more than for us. I'm as guilty as anyone. But in 2026 there's no excuse for failing to apply lessons from the last decade or two to extrapolate where AI is going.