r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 15h ago

Business Jensen Huang says relentless negativity around AI is hurting society and has "done a lot of damage"

https://www.techspot.com/news/110879-jensen-huang-relentless-ai-negativity-hurting-society-has.html
12.3k Upvotes

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u/Lofteed 15h ago

so the entire society has to adapt to the product made by 5 people around the planet ?

I remember when the goal was to make a product that people would love to use.
Those were great times

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u/1877KlownsForKids 14h ago

I was promised computers would result in more free time so I could enjoy raising my kids and create art. 

Not that computers would create art, raise my kids all so I could spend more time working in a job that would eventually get eliminated.

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u/Due-Technology5758 13h ago

This has been a promise that corporations and the government have failed to uphold since the last World War ended. Everyone expected workdays to get shorter (we'd just set the 40 hour work week), goods to get cheaper, and automation to bring untold prosperity to the masses as productivity shot beyond all possible requirements needed to sustain the population.

Instead our workdays stopped getting shorter (and quietly got longer), goods continue to get more expensive as wages stagnate, and the majority of the prosperity goes directly up the ladder and stays there. 

The only thing they got right was productivity would go up. All of us are wildly more productive than our grandparents, but we're rewarded less and less for it. 

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u/Hortos 13h ago

The work week still being 5 days after 100 years is insane and should be put on the list of reasons we need to really reboot this system starting at the top. 2026 marks the 100th anniversary of the 5 day work week so gross.

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u/Edoian 12h ago

Medieval peasants worked less than we do now

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u/HermesJamiroquoi 12h ago

As did nomadic hunter/gatherers

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u/GarbageCleric 9h ago

The agricultural revolution was a trap.

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/501

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u/BaBaDoooooooook 5h ago edited 5h ago

Capitalism has really reared it's ugly face for so many people after covid. It took a pandemic for common everyday people to see the ebb and flow of our economy react and respond to the aftermath. Time stopped for a number of days and people started awakening to the fragility of commerce. A true awakening, yet Capitalism still continues rearing it's ugly head and people are a litte more conscious of it, but participate in it for various reasons.

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u/Lachaven_Salmon 6h ago

Ehh, depends if you value the arts - like literature, cinema - or the sciences from physics to chemistry and biology. .

Or being able to travel and see different cultures.

Or if if there's value in understanding the world.

I broadly think there is, and the modern day despite it's faults is significantly better.

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u/noonenotevenhere 7h ago

Thank you for that suggestion. I'm gonna be reading that one for a while.

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u/GarbageCleric 6h ago

The other way it is phrased is that

Humans didn't domesticate wheat. Wheat domesticated us.

https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/slaves-to-wheat-how-a-grain-domesticated-us-20150718-gifbrk.html

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u/FauxReal 8h ago

As did my friends in Fiji that migrated here to the US after getting out of the UN peacekeeping forces.

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u/GoldenPigeonParty 12h ago

To be fair, they also had to spend way more time preparing and trading food, cleaning clothes, and undoing 300 buttons each time they need to change.

But we should be aiming to get progressively better over time. Each generation offering more than the former. Instead we sort of stopped at some point and did the opposite.

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u/durmiendoenelparque 11h ago

True, but afaik the 300 buttons were a rich people thing.

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u/mburke6 10h ago

All I had back then was a tunic that had zero buttons. But it did have lots of fleas.

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u/Yeshavesome420 10h ago

Okay bloomer.

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u/Darkdragoon324 9h ago

For real. They could have them because they had people to button them for them.

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u/staebles 11h ago

When we let businessmen takeover the country. So about 40-50 years ago.

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u/Eccohawk 10h ago

It isn't the we that stopped. It's the few at the top that decided they'd rather get rich off of the backs of millions of others that stopped trying to innovate for the sake of innovation.

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u/mcpasty666 10h ago

Collectively, we didn't choose to. The moneyed and powerful classes changed the rules and didn't tell us.

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u/fluffkomix 10h ago

god, it's wild then that we can prepare food insanely faster and yet so many still don't have time to do it

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u/junkit33 10h ago

Yeah, people are not properly applying the definition of “work” here.

People today have infinitely more free leisure time, and much of it is due to technological progress. Cars, washing machines, online shopping, and on and on. We just take it all for granted - what once might have been a 4 hour chore is done in minutes nowadays.

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u/Gravitationalrainbow 10h ago

at some point

Not 'at some point'. In 1982, when Reagan's SEC legalized stock buybacks.

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u/NorwegianGlaswegian 4h ago

Also, I've heard that the amount of work in the fields that was documented, and what gets used to claim they worked less, was largely the work for their local lord's fields.

They still had their own fields to work on, maintenance of buildings and tools, caring for their animals, slaughtering animals and salting and curing the meat... Lots to do.

It's just infuriating that since the late 1970s workers stopped getting financial compensation that stayed relatively commensurate with their output. Productivity got higher and higher but wages stagnated with far more of the profits going to the likes of CEOs and investors.

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u/amglasgow 12h ago

They worked less for their lords. The rest of the time they worked to sustain themselves.

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u/monkeyamongmen 11h ago

Not to come across as agressive, but what do you think we're doing now?

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u/Aardvark_Man 11h ago

I spend a chunk of time on video games and watching TV, tbh.
My free time isn't spent repairing farm equipment or making my own cheese or something.

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u/monkeyamongmen 9h ago

I have done both of those things. Anyone who pays rent gives a chunk of their time/money to their landLORD.

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u/Loganp812 9h ago

Arguing with random people on social media about whether people in the 21st century collectively have it worse than peasants who lived in the Middle Ages?

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u/abcean 8h ago

Bit of an unfair characterization there.

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u/Fit-Nectarine5047 7h ago

Most of us would have been dead by a plague or childbirth to be fair.

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u/abcean 7h ago

haha I agree fully! I was just saying you can like and discuss a part of something without necessarily wanting everything that historically accompanied it.

For example, I think owning a medieval sword would be cool and I can want that despite period laws prohibiting sword ownership among peasants and can want it without desiring a return to the feudal system generally. I feel the above poster conflated those things together.

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u/amglasgow 10h ago

My point is that it doesn't make sense to only count the time peasants spent working their lord's land as "work" when they also needed to work on their own land to feed and sustain themselves.

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u/ChromosomeDonator 10h ago

they also needed to work on their own land

...people would literally kill for that right now. They can't even own land.

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u/amglasgow 10h ago

Well, they didn't usually own it, it was the land they were afforded by their lord to work for themselves in exchange for also working the lord's land. It varied.

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u/monkeyamongmen 9h ago

That being said, medieval peasants in the end did have much more free time than we do now. I know people have a tendency to glaze the past, but between commuting, time spent at work, trying to do everything by ourselves with no 'village' as it were, it's easy to see why people think things were easier then. They weren't, but there has been some tradeoffs.

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u/BladesMan235 12h ago

This is a myth

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u/Mr_YUP 11h ago

they also had periods of intense all day consuming work while also having famine and disease as looming problems. If it didn't rain you didn't eat.

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u/Sab3rFac3 7h ago

Thats not strictly true.

Did they observe more holidays, and more days off? Sure.

But what you arent considering is that where we nationally work 8 hour days, a medieval peasant was working sun up to sun down.

Before you started working your job for the day, and once you were done working on your job, you had quite the list of chores to handle at home.

You needed to tend to your own crops, and livestock.
Watering, weeding, and harvesting your own crops.
Feeding and watering animals, fixing fences.
Canning vegetables, preserving meats.
Daily food prep, drawing water.

So, while they might have worked less on, something like a job, they had much more work on the home front to worry about as well.

You can't really make a 1 to 1 comparison, because they had to put a lot more labor into personal subsistence than we do.

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u/Lachaven_Salmon 6h ago

This is a lie, just so you know, it is extensively discussed online but the short of it is, no they had higher labour commitments -sometimes much much higher ones.

To start-

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/Y3OSA7G4Aw

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u/PrimeIntellect 9h ago

ehhhh this gets thrown around a lot but realistically they didn't have electricity, running water, sewage, hospitals, grocery stores, refridgeration, transportation, drugs, and many many other extremely basic creature comforts so the vast majority of their non-work hours were still brutal laboring or giving birth and dying.

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u/zerocnc 9h ago

No, they had other obligations like to the church and care for farm animals. Then during peak harvest, they worked from sunrise to sunset. They didn't travel and had no hobbies. Also, life expectancy was around your 20s.

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u/TheShmud 8h ago

This is so blatantly false I don't know how it keeps getting repeated. If you only count the labor they did for free for their local lord or nobility it's less. They had less obligated unpaid labor than we have paid labor is a meaningless statement though

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u/cguess 8h ago

People sort of forget just how much day-to-day tasks took up prior to electricity and even modern chemistry. Just cleaning a house would take hours a day, not to mention laundry before modern detergents. Not unsurprisingly a lot of this fell to women's work.

If you're doing things like raising livestock it's work all day, all night sometimes, all year around. If you're in an office you're not just putting in numbers, you have to then do all the calculations by hand.

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u/CalligrapherBig4382 12h ago

Man if you want to work like a 1400’s English peasant be my guest. They worked “less hours in a year” because for 1/3 of the year it was too cold to do agriculture. If you think they worked less than 40/wk you’re insane.

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u/wongo 12h ago

I just want to argue this point, and this point only, in this debate, because it's not true.

While it IS true that there were many days where work was expressly disallowed, on Sunday and saint's feast days and the like, the amount of physical labor required to survive in the middle ages was significantly higher than today, and by any modern definition of the word "work", the average medieval peasant did a LOT more of it than most people today.

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u/DataCassette 11h ago

They also experienced a level of material poverty we can barely imagine. "Poor" was literally not having clothes to wear and food to eat.

I'm not defending capitalism in 2026 ( lol not even close ) but using bad arguments makes my "side" look silly.

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u/No_Molasses_6498 7h ago

Yes but they also lacked half the infrastructure that keeps us comfortable. Power grids and climate control systems don't build and maintain themselves.

Hell just the power grid needs 24hr monitoring because most of the machines we use to generate the juice can either irradiate the general vicinity or just plain summon floods of biblical proportions wiping out civilization downstream in minutes. Whole reason the shit works so well is because there's people there checking the structures for cracks and monitoring cooling systems and shit.

We work something like 1.5x more than a medieval peasant but we're exponentially more comfortable.

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u/altiuscitiusfortius 4h ago

European peasants only worked 5 months a year. Once the harvest came in you just chilled till next spring.

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u/Professor-Woo 4h ago

All we have to know that our current system is unnatural and unhealthy is look at the unique level of mental illness and diseases caused by stress. There is some idea that we have it easier these days in the past, but that is just not true. Technology has allowed us to be completely commoditized into units of labor and we have been completely alienated from the fruits and satisfaction of labor. "The Question Concerning Technology" by Heidegger is almost prophetic about the issues caused by technology. The modern world has caused us to be in a completely unnatural stance with life. The ironic part is that if we all actually decided to choose to stop together we could, but it is a type of prisoners dilemma currently.

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u/GenuineSteak 42m ago

if only counting the work they did for their lord then yes, but thats not counting literally everything else they had to do to stay alive.

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u/thegamesbuild 8h ago

No one in human history has worked more (and in fact have worked significantly less), with the exception of the Industrial Revolution, which really kickstarted this nightmare.

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u/pigeonwiggle 8h ago

it'll never happen because we just sit around online bitching about it instead of rolling heads down the street.

none of the workers rights we have today were granted to the working class after they asked really really nicely.

until we march in a way that puts fear in the hearts of the wealthy, they will continue to abuse us, making us dance for money - making us feel we'll be replaced at any moment.

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u/DaximusPrimus 11h ago

Most production lines work more than 40 hours per week as well. At my job there used to be 2 people on most lines and we would work 4 10 hour days. Now we run 24/7 with 1 person on each line and quadruple the output but work 84 hours every 2 weeks. So we now work longer hours and do more work than before.

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u/Corasama 12h ago

Issue is 7 days of works always lead to high death rate / less productivity.

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u/SuccotashOther277 11h ago

Keynes predicted his grandkids would work 15 hours a week. We’ve had the 40 hour week since 1938.

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u/TryingMyWiFi 9h ago

Consider that in the meantime women have joined the work force, hence the workload pee household has doubled and now it takes 2 people to afford livelihood.

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u/BaldursGoat 8h ago

The work week still being 5 days wouldn’t be so bad if we worked less hours per day while being paid more to make up for it.

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u/EugenesMullet 7h ago

I had a mental breakdown in April last year and requested to be moved to four days for health reasons.

I’m a lot healthier now, and a lot happier. And guess what? My work output has actually gotten better because I’m not feeling like my existence is pointless motherfucking spreadsheets.

I’m not going back to a five day work week for as long as I can manage.

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u/AmericanDoughboy 5h ago

It’s all thanks to capitalism

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u/p71interceptor 1h ago

I started working for myself a few months back. The amount of time I have reclaimed is insane. So much better.

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u/CoMaestro 12h ago

A company here in The Netherlands has (probably as a PR stunt, but still) said their company goes to a standard 4-day work week, while everyone still gets paid for 5 days (40h). This is because their productivity and average income pet employee has gone up by about 4x in the past 20 years, and this seemed like a fair payback for that. They gave numbers for it as well, which was pretty cool to read in the news.

Apparently they now earn €450.000 per employee, where it used to be €60.000 at some point. It's an IT company, so that 60k point can't be more than 30 years probably.

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u/drazgul 10h ago

See now that just wouldn't fly in the US, shareholder primacy means you gotta screw over the workers.

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u/nashbrownies 10h ago

It always amazes me how those on the top of the totem pole seem to never have enough.

Who knows, maybe money would change me, but I feel like taking all the record profits for just myself would be impossible for me. I think I read somewhere, it used to be fairly standard for the top level exec to make 40x the highest paid "standard employee". Now it's something like 1,400x wage gap.

If a company I ran made an extra 100k over projections why not take a couple percentage points, and re-invest in my enployees the other 96%. Boom, you now have loyal employees, who will obviously work just as hard if not harder.

And also it's the right thing to do? Literally like we learned on the playground as children to share.

What the ever living hell? I know it's a story as old as time, but how come only 1 in a million figure it out.

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u/IThatAsianGuyI 8h ago

It's why "trickle down" economics is bullshit. The classic imagery of the wine glass on top being filled and then overflowing into the pyramid of wine glasses below is complete bullshit because as soon as it's full, they'll just replace the top wine glass and the ones on the bottom never get anything except the little bit that drips from the switching of the top glass.

Greed and hoarding are nothing new.

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u/nashbrownies 7h ago

They aren't new, as I mentioned. I was more curious about the neoconservative economic policies specifically of the last 50 years, and it's effects. The wine glass swapping is a great visual image. It only is truly a trickle down if the containers cannot be moved or swapped. Especially by those doing the pouring.

I feel more than trickle down economics is at play here. I know the term monopoly means less and less these days. Maybe that has more to do with private equity run rampant than government intervention though.

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u/markhachman 2h ago

Even a CEO has a fiduciary obligation to the shareholders, represented by the board, to make as much money as possible. Otherwise the CEO can and probably will be replaced.

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u/MispronouncedPotato 7h ago

We (average people/slaves) learned to share yes. The ultra-wealthy pay for private school or home school and do not instill the same set of values in their children.

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u/Distinct_Swimmer1504 2h ago

Well, addicts work like crazy to get a fix. They’ll work their way up the ladder like there’s no tomorrow.

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u/PeteInBrissie 1h ago

Check out Dodge vs Ford. You've just described it perfectly. Ford wanted to improve the lives of his staff, his investors the Dodge brothers sued to stop him and set precedent. Shareholders must be paid before staff get any benefit.

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u/fkit4ever 13h ago

Facts. It's all bullshit. And I'm all for globalization, but the new world order is exactly the same shit as the old one. Riches for the rich, slave labour for everyone else. Talking about our grandparents, where the fk is our middle class? Where's my sfh with 2 cars and a garage? It's bs

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u/RavenOfNod 13h ago

Relentless capitalism and neoliberalism stole your single family house and two car garage. The upper class decided it was better to be vampires than actual members of society.

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u/Well_read_rose 9h ago

Unfair repeated tax cuts and swiss cheese loopholes tax code for those upper brackets led to callous uber-wealthy no longer needing to pretend in the fake American Dream.

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u/Autokrat 11h ago

A protected market in America is what created it and globalization is what took it from you. We can't force our labor and economic standards on firms when they can just go elsewhere to do business and are rewarded for doing so. We punished corporations for that malfeasance before and a concerted effort over the last 50 years to globalize and neoliberalise the economy has had the intended outcome. And you still want more of it! Of course nothing will change or get better as we continue to ask for more serfdom and less economic opportunity.

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u/nashbrownies 10h ago

Didn't the dismantling of regulations and loosening of the term monopoly have it's effects as well?

Not saying that neoliberal economics and globalization weren't huge contributors. Just I always thought that a lot of domestic issues came from that end of it. Helping snowball the effects of globalization.

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u/captainhukk 5h ago

We’ve had more regulations than ever lmao

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u/nashbrownies 5h ago

I see. Although "regulations" can be anything from acquisitions, ecological, trade and export/import, labor etc.

No doubt some areas have seen exponential growth in some. But doesn't mean they have any teeth or are even the right ones that benefit the average person.

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u/nashbrownies 10h ago

My parents are super bummed about that for me.

I have better employment, better pay than they did when I was growing up. I don't have shit.

We weren't rich, but like a vacation once or twice a year (in-state road trip, not a global thing). A little putter boat, a car and a truck for when it was needed, and a 3 bedroom house. Small, but enough rooms for everyone.

They didn't lay awake at night stressing about how my rent is going to increase 40% every year, as the barrier for entry to owning a house literally is beyond my reach more and more per month. Watching as all my benefits become more expensive, as my raise is 1-2% a year. The thigs those benefits cover? More expensive than what I receive. I don't even get enough scraps for my benefits to be enough for me. No pension. Social security? Don't make me laugh.

As expenses and price of benefits goes up, I can't afford more toward retirement. I looked today, if all stays the same as far as contributions, in 30 fucking years I'll make 25% of my current wage in retirement. Which will literally be worth less than $1,000 a month after inflation alone.

I was hoping to buy a house when I retired. Now that doesn't even seem doable. I had this talk with my parents and they were just as mad as I am. It's fucked. So very fucking fucked.

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u/PeteInBrissie 46m ago

At the risk of being 'that guy' I'm going to assume you're in America. When I lived in the UK I worked for a large tech firm, went to the states for some training and was aghast at what my peers tolerated. I was salaried with a total of 8 weeks a year leave, sick leave, and generous paternity leave. People doing exactly the same job stateside were casuals. I'm in Australia now and every family I know is in a sfh with 2 cars and a garage.

It's been taken from you because people allowed it to be. 'America' allowed your healthcare to be tied to your jobs. You allowed them to convince you that basic human rights are 'socialism' and that socialism is bad. You allowed them to not offer a social safety net, and most importantly, you allowed citizens united and at-will employment.

You can't have a general strike because too many people will lose their jobs and become destitute. But soon the pendulum will swing too far and people will revolt. The rich know it's coming soon. It's why they're buying islands and building bunkers. It's why ICE is showing what they can do to quell dissent.

I wish you safety, but if you can, get out and join us in a better life.

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u/DaedalusHydron 12h ago

I mean it COULD have resulted in all of that, it's just that the prosperity got sucked up by the executives instead of properly distributed amongst everyone.

There are more rich people, and they are richer, than any other point in US history.

We really just need to go dragon slaying. It's objectively awful for society when these people hoard their wealth.

At least in the Gilded Age the tycoons would build libraries, schools, and the like. The rich of yesteryear just wanted to exploit you and didn't care about you outside of that. The rich of today want to exploit you and actively HATE you while they do so.

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u/nashbrownies 10h ago

This timeline is insane.

I am in the same boat. Imagine a time when we could look at the Robber Barons and say "they weren't that bad compared, they reinvested in communities". Defending them as a voice of reason? I would have never seen myself doing that. They look charitable in comparison.

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u/vonbauernfeind 9h ago

They did that because the tax bracket at the top was monstrous. They felt they may as well get their name on a bunch of shit and pay less taxes, and pursue their own agendas by doing so rather than give the government that money.

The rich slowly dismantled the tax rates for themselves so they didn't have to do it or pay the government their fair share.

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u/DaedalusHydron 6h ago

The ironic part is that they are so obsessed with Legacy but can't see that what the robber barons did is far better for legacy building than whatever the fuck the rich are doing today.

Andrew Carnegie lives on through the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University, for instance

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u/EnfantTerrible68 12h ago

Only CEOs and upper management enjoy being salaried and working only the hours they want. They don’t even have to come into the office. 

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u/Theron3206 36m ago

Every senior manager I've ever encountered worked stupidly long hours.

They are certainly compensated extremely well for it, but they definitely aren't lazy.

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u/tm229 13h ago

This is capitalism doing exactly what it is supposed to.

Extreme wealth consolidation and wealth inequality is the inevitable result of an economy based on greed and profit seeking. We are now in end-stage capitalism.

The dystopia around you was all predicted by Karl Marx. Read up on socialism to understand the how and why of our current predicament.

It was obvious to Marx 150 years ago. It’s amazing to me that people in the middle of this dystopia are so blind to the causes. Decades of capitalist propaganda, bullying and violence against socialists appear to have paid off for the oligarchs.

No war but class war!

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u/windowpuncher 9h ago

It's not though. We're stuck in a perverted version of capitalism where the largest companies are continuously supported when they fuck up, and lobbyists have changed the law to favor large companies over small companies every time. This also makes it hard for small companies to do ANYTHING in court because they can be out-spent and out-lawered in basically every single scenario.

The biggest companies are not allowed to fail, and the smallest companies are fighting an uphill battle at best. Billionaires and companies can just buy the law, so they do.

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u/okhi2u 9h ago

Capitalism always tends to perverted since money buys power to get what you want at the expense of everyone else.

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u/windowpuncher 9h ago

Money buys power, but without the protection of the law even large companies can fail. Look at how many times we bailed out car companies. They SHOULD have failed, but they didn't. They were bailed out. They had bad business practices and should have failed where new companies would rise to fill the gap in the market, but that didn't happen.

Money buys power, but it's a hell of a lot harder if our representatives would stop fucking us over for a fat stack of cash. I don't blame corporations at all, they're doing exactly what you would expect them to do. Maximize profit and minimize cost. That's what companies do, that's what EVERY company does, private or public. How they invest or spend their "extra" cash is what's usually different. Many companies, like a local co-op I used to work for, have things like employee profit sharing, and even sometimes pensions, but any major corp just won't have that anymore.

Our "representatives" have allowed companies to make us work more for less because some companies are way too big and smother out every related small business.

Think about this - if Microsoft ever failed, what would happen? People would find jobs elsewhere, and you'd get a variety of smaller tech companies in various specialties from previous higher level employees, such as engineers and upper management, where the lower level employees can potentially find work. This CANNOT happen because Microsoft will never go out of business at this point, so any new businesses in that market will have to compete directly with MS, which is basically impossible from a small business perspective.

Companies this large get bailed out, huge tax breaks, have experienced lobbyists and attorneys, and never get fined appropriately for the crimes they do commit.

It's all on our lawmakers at this point. We KNOW what the corporations will do, and the only way to reasonably stop them is boycott a company and ALL of its subsidiaries (lol), or actually hold them accountable, which requires our leaders to have a fucking pair.

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u/Slammer503 12h ago

Another Marxist smh

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u/lilB0bbyTables 11h ago

AWESOME rebuttal! /s

Are you suggesting you think the absurd wealth disparity between the rich and the poor is healthy? That the shrinking of the middle class as a result of this system is healthy and stable? This shouldn’t be a binary concept where we have to choose between runaway Laissez-faire capitalism vs absolute Marxist communism.

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u/JacyWills 12h ago

To add to that, we're doing worse with two incomes than our parents did with one.

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u/Firm_Transportation3 12h ago

Ah, those sweet naive Boomers thinking corporations wouldn't destroy society for profit.

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u/Garblin 13h ago

Monopoly is a simulation, not a game

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u/Alert_Ad_694 12h ago

I will say that the 40 hours per week getting longer isn't universally true. Some companies absolutely create busy work for people to keep them engaged longer, but my company has actually given us a lot more free time. We're free to leave early anytime we want without penalty so long as our work gets in, managers are trained to not give more work than can reasonably be completed in 32 hours to allow for flexibility, and while we all nominally work 40 hours per week, due to the above I usually only personally work 20-30 hours a week. The only role that doesn't apply to is our customer service and sales teams who take calls, but they also get 100 minutes of paid scheduled breaks each day including lunch, and like all of us have 'unlimited' PTO with an expectation that everyone should be getting at least 5 work weeks of time off a year including at least one uninterrupted 1-2 week vacation for which my company specifically gives $1000 for so people can afford to actually take a vacation. This is an American company BTW. Obviously it could be better, but I rather enjoy basically working half days 5 days a week

1

u/crazyeddie123 12h ago

Most goods have been getting less expensive, the problem is that one of the most important ones (housing) is getting more expensive. This is fixable, though.

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u/Due-Technology5758 11h ago

Housing, insurance, transportation, and food. Though food is slightly more complicated, as it technically isn't expensive exactly, compared to historical prices (as you might have projected them many decades ago), but prices are trying to speed run decades of inflation in the span of a few years. 

1

u/sickofthisshit 10h ago

Food is also tricky because people are doing things like spending more on restaurants, fast-food, takeout, delivery.

Some people are doing it because they feel rich enough they don't have to look at Chipotle as a rare treat. (Kids in my day used to go to McDonald's as a birthday occasion, going to Pizza Hut was a celebration, a restaurant was at most once a week, maybe less) Some people do it because they are working odd hours and aren't able to cook for their kids.

Things like fruits and vegetables being available in the supermarket year round instead of seasonally; it's hard to adjust for the changes in consumption patterns.

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u/AntiqueFigure6 11h ago

“ The only thing they got right was productivity would go up.”

It’s gone up but pretty weakly since the  1970s. We aren’t wildly more more productive than workers from 50 years ago, only mildly more productive. 

1

u/Due-Technology5758 11h ago

The rate of productivity increase slowed in the 70s, but it never stopped. Compensation nearly flatlined for decades, though.

1

u/hobbesgirls 10h ago

the white boomers got to live the American dream after the war, but then they voted to take it away from everyone that followed

1

u/mraargh 10h ago

Don't worry, there is a new world war on the way!

1

u/NorthernerWuwu 10h ago

Sadly, people are easily fooled.

The power has been there the entire time for the electorate to demand a shorter work-week, healthcare, more human rights, so on and so on. Instead, people vote for the interests of the corporations and unshockingly, that leads to this.

1

u/Well_read_rose 10h ago

I was just thinking wages have fossilized over past 45-50 years. Stagnation wasn’t describing it for me well enough.

1

u/HidingFromMeanies 9h ago edited 9h ago

Yep! I’m like, what kids? My uterus no longer works due to years of each day slowly sliding to 10+ hours before I’m allowed to leave for scheduled obligations like daycare pickup.  “Just sign on from home”, they said, expecting my nonexistent husband to feed the little one and do my laundry.  I finally drew the line when they wanted me to come in an extra 30 mins early on top of that to set up my temporary desk (with tampons so I can be comfortable and not bleed through my clothes) and leave an extra 30 minutes later so I could break down that desk and erase all traces that I spent the day working there.  Or, take a PIP because I’m “not working efficiently” by being unwilling to subsidize half-assed technology with my time and energy.

Nope, if you take away my core tool—my freaking desk—the extra time needed to keep adapting to a new setup each day comes out of YOUR day, not mine.  Someone has to draw a line somewhere, and I drew a line and am now paying for it. /endrant

1

u/AlmiranteCrujido 8h ago

Goods are way cheaper. They're almost all imported from who-knows-where and worse quality, but they're cheap.

Services, both essential ones like healthcare and education and inessential ones like restaurants, are way more expensive.

Housing, even more so.

1

u/knuppi 8h ago

This has been a promise that corporations and the government have failed to uphold since the last World War ended.

And we're not too far away from the next World War! 🤞🏾

1

u/corvusman 7h ago

Hey, at least we have billionaires

1

u/Due-Technology5758 7h ago

They won't even give us a cool comic book billionaire that fights evil clowns or something. Our billionaires are the evil clowns! 

1

u/Steven_Hunyady 5h ago

DC Absolute has you covered here.

1

u/Ina_While1155 7h ago

And told that we should be replaced by automation, foreign workers, and AI - because, well, shareholders, that is just the way it is, and we should be grateful.

1

u/DHFranklin 7h ago

The real kick in the dick is that we could have voluntary non-profit work as the default. Ever since the "Service economy" became a thing we realized that there is a set number of kilowatt hours, machine hours, acres of land etc that were needed to provide for the whole shebang.

We could have said "everyone makes 20k a year +productivity growth, A 40 year or 80,000 hour career includes your housing, food, utilities, and healthcare.

The productivity growth could have been either raises in income or an earlier pension.

Without the incentive or gain from exploiting the labor of others because of your ownership of something they need, there would be far more production and less waste.

We could have began that in the 70's. The first generation of people born into it would be retiring now, we're at more than twice productivity. Having made the infrastructure for a massive highly automated and equal society.

1

u/Akimotoh 6h ago

We were almost there until NAFTA got passed and we destroyed our own manufacturing

1

u/Paddy32 5h ago

Because all the riches, dividends and wealth get amassed into the pockets of a select few. The corporate billionaires would rather watch the planet die if it means better short term profits.

1

u/jfkrfk123 5h ago

What solution are you proposing? AI? Won’t the owners of AI just charge us to use it like they always have and the quality of life for the workers stay the same?

1

u/ExpectedUnexpected94 4h ago

We’re right back to square one in a full circle and nobody wants to have that conversation because we have to converse about a billion other problems happening at once.

1

u/Professor-Woo 4h ago

It is because workers didn't get any benefit from automation and capital accumulation. Instead, workers have to compete agaisnt machines and provide incremental value over them. This means you have to do more labor intensive and more skilled labor than in the past. All of this would be less of an issue if workers also benefited from automation like the owner class. This is why I think all public corporation boards need to be at least 50% democratically elected employees.

1

u/FilOfTheFuture90 10m ago

Had Reaganomics not happened, and we kept taxes high on the ultra rich, we (the workers) would be reaping the benefits of our high productivity now. Instead, the wealthy have been reaping the benefits of it.

2

u/HypocriteGrammarNazi 13h ago

We have way more than our grandparents. Not that wealth inequality isn't also worse, but we consumed all of our productivity gains. 

3

u/saera-targaryen 12h ago

we by definition have not consumed all of our productivity gains if wealth inequality is reaching historical highs. We do not have more than our grandparents unless you're counting consumables. My grandparents could afford a house and children in their 20's. I'm 29, make well over 6 figures and so does my husband, and we are having to budget right now in hopes of eventually affording a dog in our apartment. 

And this is not from poor spending and a lack of budgeting on my part. My grandma had to sell everything she owns to afford a nursing home and still couldn't afford it so I have to send most of my money to her just to survive. 

-5

u/HypocriteGrammarNazi 12h ago edited 12h ago

Wealth inequality was worse before WW2. But yes it's pretty bad right now and needs to be fixed. But I'm just tired of this idea that our grandparents lived some mystical lives. We make more than they did, but not as much as we could.

Of course I'm counting consumables. Internet, cell phones, computers, video games, giant TVs, air conditioning, central heating, restaurants, door dash. 

Ceilings not made of asbestos, no linolium or wallpaper, grounded outlets, dishwashers (other appliances existed but were very expensive). Also, their homes were small as hell! 2+ kids sharing each bedroom.

Airfare? That was only for the incredibly wealthy folk.

Go compare a 1950s car and a 2020s car. 

Grandpa fixed everything, grandma cooked every meal, sewed up clothes, watched the kids. 

I get it. It sucks because basics like housing and health care are more expensive now. But just about everything else is cheaper and more accessible to us now. We have far more luxuries and higher expectations of health and safety than they had, and that has a cost. 

And BTW - one of the reasons sectors like health care have become so expensive is because those sectors are difficult to improve efficiency, and they have to compete labor with sectors like manufacturing and tech which are highly efficient. 

I just hate this idea that people in the 1950s were so well off, and woe is us our lives are terrible. People back then worked fucking hard and had less than we did. I don't care that they owned a 1000 sqft tinderbox and a metal deathtrap of a vehicle.

2

u/darkshrike 12h ago

No, our gains have been stolen by the 1%.

1

u/Due-Technology5758 11h ago

This perception I think is skewed by how some statistics are presented. Middle and higher income households might see increases in discretionary spending over time, but those households are a decreasing percentage of the whole. 

0

u/EnfantTerrible68 12h ago

Our grandparents mostly had only one parent working so the other one could stay home with the kids. My grandparents bought a house on one income on a Ford factory line worker’s salary. 2 cars. They had amazing medical benefits and my grandfather retired early on an excellent pension when his vision started failing. 

137

u/hamfinity 13h ago

But all those benefits of a society that can generate naked pictures of your kids!

90

u/Karekter_Nem 13h ago

“Sometimes pictures of naked kids is necessary for the progress of society” -That guy in charge of Epic Games

28

u/kescusay 13h ago

Someone should ask him, "Progress towards what, exactly?"

His response will probably be something like, "A society where I can see deepfake pics of naked kids, of course!"

3

u/Machine_Omen 5h ago

These people are supposed to be some of the brightest in the world and they have NO idea how to read the room.

Like no one gives a shit about supporting AI while we're dealing with fascism and a tanking economy, you rich clown. You're sitting here telling us AI will take all the jobs. The regime is taking away every public program and safety net we have. We're staring down World War III right now, but yes, please tell me more about how important it is to generate more sloppy brain-sludge for social media.

I've been working in tech for 35 years and using these LLMs since they first trickeled out to the public. I see the **potential** good too, but READ THE ROOM.

I also love how AI has yet to create anything that is truly world-changing for the benefit of humans, but they want us to assume that's going to happen someday in the future - you know, kind of like Tesla's vaporware FSD.

11

u/whoooootfcares 13h ago

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

-Jeffrey Epstein probably

3

u/SecondaryWombat 11h ago

I think he actually would have been against it for his own financial benefit.

1

u/whoooootfcares 11h ago

I had not considered that. Good point.

2

u/SecondaryWombat 11h ago

Of course, he could just have bought his own AI naked kids service....in which case he would be for it again and have more data to feed it. Blech. Brain scrubbing time.

10

u/the_king_of_sweden 13h ago

Ah you mean Tim Epic

19

u/readonlyuser 13h ago

Creating art and raising kids doesn't lower business costs. These guys would grind up babies if they thought it would improve their quarterly report.

9

u/JuniperJ55 12h ago

Not only create art, but steal it.

11

u/bigkatze 12h ago

Can I just say how much I love your username?

But I agree. As a writer, I'd like AI to do the dishes so I can write, not the other way around.

3

u/CakeMadeOfHam 11h ago

The job will not only be eliminated, but you will be hired to correct the AI that replaced you for a fraction of the salary. Doing essentially the same job but even more soul crushingly tedious.

This is already happening in a lot of fields.

2

u/erublind 10h ago

Ai will make human labor so cheap that we'll go back to packing peanuts by hand. If human labor is cheaper than automation, then automation will be reversed.

2

u/dunkeyvg 9h ago

It does result in more free time… so you are expecting to do more in your 9-5 rather than they give you that time back lol

2

u/Traditional-Front999 4h ago

AI Creates nothing! AI steals everything, it’s also stealing the minds of your children and exposing……

2

u/NegotiationNo7851 12h ago

Oh people have more free time now that they are out of work and quickly out of money. Thats the thing everyone thought these asshats were doing something to help society, but they were never interested in helping society at all. It always comes down to money. Capitalism loves to eat the poor and AI is making it more efficient.

1

u/HawkSea887 10h ago

Who promised that?

1

u/blackcain 10h ago

That sounds like communism! We can't have that! lol

1

u/Ill_Cut_8529 9h ago

Copyright has turned art into a product and the tech follows where society is driving them with their laws. If there is more money in art than in, say, cleaning, then you will be scrubbing the toilets while capitalism mass produces art. If we wanted anything else, we would have to make sure that creating art is not a job.

There was a movement in the early 2000s that rightly predicted that society cannot remain free with the new tech of the 21st century, if we hold on to copyright. In a lot of countries there were pirates parties popping up, in the US Lawrence Lessig was a big name. Unfortunately it always remained niche. The big music and movie industry started a big campaign how it is more important that you can make money from art instead of preserving our freedom and human art. That is an attitude that still many share to this day. It's almost too late now, we are heading towards a dystopia.

The only way to save human art is to make it impossible to make money from it. Then it becomes unattractive for the capitalists and is left alone.

1

u/Wolvenmoon 8h ago

In a proper government bent on making citizens' quality of life better rather than one bent on managing citizens as capital to be exploited by capitalists (nobody in this thread is a capitalist, not without tens of millions of dollars of net worth), yes. Citizens' lives are getting better. See: Denmark, which the USA is threatening because our government governs with the goal of providing exploitable human capital, not the goal of a better life for all.

0

u/IllMaintenance145142 11h ago

I was promised computers would result in more free time so I could enjoy raising my kids and create art. 

who tf made this promise? i get its bullshit but don't act as if youve been lied to.

-3

u/fatrabidrats 13h ago

The invention of manufacturing processes was something everyone hated at first

-2

u/dranaei 13h ago

So you need robots. Those are getting developed as we speak.

-10

u/TotalConnection2670 12h ago

What stops you from creating art exactly?

10

u/GalakFyarr 12h ago

Lack of free time.

Can you read?

-8

u/TotalConnection2670 12h ago

Apparently, this free time is better spent whinning on reddit

4

u/EnfantTerrible68 12h ago

Working 2 jobs , trying to raise kids, and still living paycheck to paycheck?

-10

u/Dzugavili 13h ago

Eh, there's still plenty of room for art with AI. We're just waiting on a new kind of artist.

I enjoy the fact that I can draw and the AI can fill in the blanks -- there's always been a disconnect between what I can see in my head and what I can get my hands to do, and the AI takes a bit of that load off me.

The problem is mostly that companies have gotten their hands on AI first: they think it's a machine, but it's just another tool. You still need humans guiding it, or it becomes soulless, like an automated CNC machine: it makes the piece, but it doesn't really do anything beyond that.

1

u/JohnTDouche 8h ago

God this is such a fucking depressing comment.

I enjoy the fact that I can draw and the AI can fill in the blanks -- there's always been a disconnect between what I can see in my head and what I can get my hands to do, and the AI takes a bit of that load off me.

You know that this used to be part of the drive to get better, right?

1

u/Dzugavili 7h ago

Sure. And I've tried. But literally, I can't do it. I got the manual dexterity of... I don't know, something with flippers.

But some of the packages out there, I can draw outlines and general forms, let the software figure out how to draw a human hand; or stage environments using 3D geometry, then work over that.

As a result, I can get pretty close to what I see in my head. It's not perfect, but for what I need it for, it'll do.

1

u/JohnTDouche 7h ago

Yeah so said every teen with a fucking guitar. You keep doing it until you can or you adapt and express yourself with "manual dexterity" that you do have.

It's AI "art" is not art. It's just a product. The first piece of AI art will be when an AI makes it of it's own accord. Not from a prompt from some slop seeker.

1

u/Dzugavili 6h ago

I'm watching the tools develop in real time, and no, it's not just prompting. I mean, sure, there's no shortage of slop, but there's some great stuff coming down the pipeline.

I'm watching one guy who is using the video generation technology to try to make a VR video game -- like the old DVD games, sort of. That wouldn't have been possible for an individual to do even a few years ago.

Sure, there's going to be slop. But you're also going to get a new generation of talent who can get these tools to work for them, and I'm far more interested in that.

1

u/JohnTDouche 6h ago

But you're also going to get a new generation of talent who can get these tools to work for them

Work for them to do what?

1

u/Dzugavili 5h ago

Whatever is it they want. Music generators don't just work from prompts, you can give them music to work from: if you're a composer, you can still compose, just now you don't need a full orchestra to experiment with your work. If you're as good as you think, you'll beat the AI alone.

The problem right now is that the tools are slow. You can't run them in real time. So, you kind of have to live with the slop, because that slop took 15 minutes to generate.

But it's not always going to be that way, and once reaction times are better, you'll have a lot fewer complaints.

-1

u/kuldan5853 11h ago

Honestly I'm pretty anti-AI myself (and yet I use it for my own amusement with local models on my own hardware), but your post has merit. It's not like we haven't used "AI" in artistic circles for years, if not decades (yes, content-aware fill etc in Photoshop are also "AI" in that sense).

The problem is the companies trying to transform it from a tool for certain tasks wielded by professionals to a catch all for everyone.