r/singularity • u/simmol • 3h ago
AI Is Downplaying AI Just Rational Self-Interest?
I'm generally on the pro-AI side, and I honestly can't stand some of the irrational anti-AI comments I see on Reddit. But if I were to steelman the other side, the argument might go something like this:
- Suppose AI is genuinely capable of automating a substantial portion of my job.
- If my manager recognizes this, my job security might deteriorate.
- If my manager believes AI is unreliable, overhyped, or generally useless, there's less incentive to replace me with it.
- Therefore, even if I privately recognize AI's capabilities, I have an incentive to publicly downplay them.
So I do wonder what percentage of people who constantly dismiss AI's capabilities are actually operating under this logic, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Because from the perspective of individual self-interest, being publicly anti-AI might actually be the rational position.
Thoughts?
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u/manikfox 3h ago
You can't generalize everyone.
Id assume people dislike AI:
- Stealing everyone's work for no credit.
- Thinks it's not useful (using free tier with bad results)
- Replacing their own job (in future or already)
- Billionaires control it, so keeping them in power
- Removes humanity (ie humans have little place or purpose anymore)
- They see Terminator and didn't like the outcome
- Everything has become more expensive because of it (ram, hard drives, electricity, etc)
I'm sure there's more, but everyone has their own reasons. I'm pro AI in all forms. Let the acceleration come to its conclusion, for better or worse.
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u/Switched_On_SNES 2h ago
Why do you want acceleration? I see so many people convinced that it will lead to a post-scarcity world where we have high ubi and leisure time but nothing in modern society indicates it would follow that. Seems it’s significantly more likely to lead to an Elysium sort of world with extreme wealth inequality. Hope I’m wrong
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u/TimotheusIV 2h ago
The accelerationist movement is, like you said, mostly based on complete fantasy.
And it’s mostly populated by people in a pretty dire mental or financial situation who see this as a real shot to a better future. And it needs to come sooner rather than later.
It’s basically buying scratch cards and hoping you win the lottery so you don’t have to live in poverty anymore.
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u/Switched_On_SNES 2h ago
The only hope for the utopian future of accelerationism is working class solidarity and political uprising. Unfortunately with ai systems, that will most likely be squashed.
What I don’t understand is what sort of world do the ultra wealthy want to live in where everyone is destitute and no one can afford to buy any of their products.
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u/TimotheusIV 2h ago
I agree. There needs to be complete social reform if AI proves to be what the big tech companies say it’s going to be.
But I fear time is running out. A complete uprising against the billionaire class is maybe possible today, but in a few years once AI has it’s hooks in all infrastructure, power, communication? I doubt it. It’s basically a perfect totalitarian regime.
And I don’t think the ultra wealthy care about people buying their products. If their power and influence becomes self-sustaining through robotics and AI, they’ll just live out their days in paradise while the lower classes rabble in their fenced-off corner of the planet.
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u/Switched_On_SNES 2h ago
The thing is they already have infinite access to a beautiful world, they literally have nothing else to gain. Even if you just have 10 million dollars you could spend the rest of your life jetskiing around tropical islands and never working, let alone a billion dollars.
So what could possibly be the end goal besides just making more money for the sake of winning (a disease imo).
If anything they could use their money to save the world to keep it beautiful but they’re literally doing the one thing that’s destroying it by building data centers and hemorrhaging electricity.
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u/lgmarian 1h ago
With money you can do things, and compete with others -- past, present, and future -- for the sake of doing more/only/first/whatever. That's the goal.
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u/APersonNamedBen 1h ago
I'm not an accelerationist but if I approach the question honestly I can imagine saying yes to a question like 'with everything you know now about humans and ants, if humans didn't exist and ants gained the conscious ability to create humans, do you think they should?'
But I don't expect a reality populated by humans to be this philosophically clean. We gonna fuck shit up.
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u/Johnny20022002 1h ago
Technological progress does trickle down unlike wealth. Just look at the fact that 70% of the world has a smart phone. We managed to get that to the majority of the world and we’re not even a super intelligence. AI will be able to saturate the world with its technology.
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u/ClammyHandedFreak 3h ago edited 3h ago
Most people, who are living paycheck to paycheck, really don’t care about this stuff because their life is difficult and complicated enough. They live at their limit. I know when I was destitute the last thing I cared about was current events or politics.
They believe their life will be the same after AI. They will be scraping to survive. Realistically, they are probably right.
Among the people I know, it’s those who have some decent job to lose that are concerned or excited about this stuff.
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u/DJ_Mixto 3h ago edited 2h ago
Here is a rational no-nonsense take:
AI doesn’t need to ‘end humanity in 6 months’, ‘turn on mankind because we are no longer relevant’ or any such nonsense. What it can do, is to be commandeered by people who have created it, or who fund and control the models, and simply be the shitty version of humans they are, megalomaniacs they are, and use these powerful tools to ‘optimize’ people out of place. No job, no marketplace for the now missing income to be spent, collapse of said market due to no market opportunities, collapse of businesses and business sectors, loss of reason for and use of office space, retail space, and a hollowing out of physical, interconnected society.
That’s real. Not ‘AI is coming to kill us’ foolishness. Just, natural acts unfolding due to a sea change in where humans no longer factor or belong.
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u/TheSuperiorKyle 3h ago
The people who downplay ai are either uneducated on the facts, they don’t wanna talk about dark things, or they’re ignorant.
The ignorance is very obvious when you talk to a very religious person about ai. They always make it about their god or some prophecy about the Middle East lol.
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u/kikirikipop 1h ago
I talked to my religious uncle about AI and he kept repeating that AI cannot have reason (because reason is a gift from God given only to mankind).
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u/YourWifesBoyfriend5 3h ago
This post literally just provided an alternative explanation, and you proceeded to respond by saying it could only be one of 3 things…
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u/AgentStabby 3h ago
It's the system 1 answer (ask your ai about thinking fast and slow system answers).
They see post, brain supplies answer vaguely related to the topic, they post comment.
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u/Slow_Lion_4178 3h ago
Pretending to dislike AI to keep your job is not a rational thing to do.
AI at the public level is not at all comparable to frontier level stuff; the night/day difference matters immensely and renders this particular line of thinking weird and worthless.
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u/simmol 3h ago
It isn't even pretending probably. You can dislike AI and be intellectually dishonest about its capabilities and many people will do so if survival instincts kick in.
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u/Slow_Lion_4178 2h ago
Do you think job maintenance has instinctual ramifications?
I disagree with that one.
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u/ngocnv371 3h ago
I'll praise AI to the moon with my colleagues (all IT) but I'll never bring it up in conversation with my boss. When asked I will point to the many AI shorts of dancing ladies (which I know he despised) and asked if he tried to use it to make a website from start to finish yet. And I will feel the traumatic flashback in his eyes, yes, he did try and he's still confused.
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u/DriverAdventurous952 1h ago
It's people unable to be honest about a situation that they don't like. Damn near everyone does it all the time. It's always so weird to me too. Like, what are you really going to do? Deny the reality right in front of you, speeding at you like a train in a tunnel? Seriously. Just stop expecting everyone to go with your charade already. Face the music.
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u/karl_mainz 1h ago
I think it’s just due to people having vastly different experiences of AI.
At work, I’m using Opus 5.5 and Astra 6 on High and Extra High because we have a massive individual AI budget that I could never fully deplete.
At home, I’m mostly using Luna on Low and Medium to conserve tokens.
The difference in capability is gigantic. In the end, I will pay for my own personal subscription to use at home because I’d rather pay €20 a month than lose so much time correcting Luna.
But a lot of the people that talk about AI still being useless have never paid for it, so they are stuck using those low capability models.
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u/AIGODSEND 1h ago
both true and that is what makes it spicy. grief plus paycheck logic stack, denial protects meaning and mortgage at once. even if workers hype it, owners capture it, so downplaying is also negotiation. here is the twist though, managers read these threads too, and widespread downplaying delays adoption which protects jobs short term but surrenders the reps race. so rational individually, tragic collectively. which one do you catch yourself doing?
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u/UnderstandingEasy856 32m ago edited 17m ago
Your manager (if they're not cluelessly naive) will also recognize that their job is equally automatable, and the director above them, and the VP above them. Furthermore the skillset of a middle manager is heavily tied to their team/org size. Being a "manager" of agents doesn't carry the same cachet or career value as a manager of human employees. It is in the entire management chain's interest to make token use of AI in a way that pays lip service but does not reduce headcount too severely.
A similar dynamic could be seen in organizations long before AI - teams getting ever larger, doing incredible amounts of make-work that amounts to nothing, satisfying made-up KPIs and so that all the managers in the scheme can climb the ladder.
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u/No-Head-Royal 3h ago
It is self-interest, though not always as rational as you think. People don't tend to be as Machiavellian as you make them out to be, but they also do follow self-interest through a set of heuristics (often expressed as emotional reactions or thinking, but they're not wholly illogical). So rather than "if AI is not hyped up and AGI is coming, then my job could be automated away and on a larger scale, due to the complete absence of social security systems in my country, mass misery could ensue. Therefore, I shall rationally and strategically downplay AI".
It's closer to an emotional reaction to that -> "AGI would be horrible" gut feeling -> instinctual reaction to downplay AI as "it cannot possibly achieve AGI and fuck us all up!" -> public dismissal and discomfort, annoyance, or anger at it. Then combined with society-wide tribal reactions of fear and dismissiveness against AI, then you'd get a self-reinforcing loop.
It gets to roughly the same results, but again. People tend to follow emotional heuristics (for good reason: if you're not in a position to benefit from this, then thinking more about the Singularity doesn't give you much more leverage, right? r/singularity Redditors are not much more successful than normal anti-AI people. While it wastes important emotional and mental energy). It's not bad, but also not as rational or intentional as you'd think it is.
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u/simmol 3h ago
Pretty solid post. I do agree that for majority of people, it won't be planned out in this type of a manner. I suppose I can phrase it differnetly and say that out of all the reasons to be anti-AI, this one feels the most rational (at least from outside looking in).
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u/No-Head-Royal 3h ago
What people say to be "irrational" and "emotional" actually often are "good enough" heuristics. Knowledge is not always an advantage, especially in terms of resources expended. Let's say some guy has been following LLMs for 5 years but mostly browses r/singularity and wastes time, and another guy was maybe watching football for fun instead and made friends and is in a better mental space and maybe even a better job position. And now he took a 6-month course, and his ability to use Opus 5.5 is pretty much equal to somebody who knew how to jackboot GPT-3 to do proto-chain-of-thought. So, being anti-AI cost him very little in terms of how much advantage he gets from AI eventually, while being pro-AI didn't reward our r/singularity guy much at all aside from a smug sense of vindication. (Same thing for Yudkowsky's gang: they seem mostly right about the alignment problem and spent years convincing people to take AGI seriously, to considerable success; but then their efforts were largely hoofed up and other guys became the billionaires with trillion-dollar companies instead.)
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u/parentrapbattle 3h ago
I’m using AI every day and genuinely believe it is oversold and is dumbing down junior colleagues who did not have the benefit of years of doing work without AI. Even as its capabilities grow it is like a bright intern who does not really understand what it has studied
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 2h ago
Why are you so worried about people who downplay AI? They're more rational than any pro-AI people. Believing in fantasies about technological utopia and UBI is not rational. It goes against capitalism and it goes against human nature. Being pro-AI is the ultimate copium. It's like a new religion for the modern era.
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u/fallingfrog 3h ago
Nah its a psychological defense mechanism. AI cuts to the core of where we find meaning, and it will destroy so many communities. The first stage of grief is denial