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Rebuff500701/22/20252 repliesview on HN

Tangential, but this has gotten me thinking...

I used to wonder how the hundreds of thousands of employees that work in Big Oil or Big Pharma could tolerate all the terrible things their company does... e.g. the opioid epidemic. The naive optimist in me never thought that the tech industry would ever be that bad.

Now, as someone thats been in the industry for 10+ years and working adjacent to LLMs, this is all so depressing. The hype has gotten out of control. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on things that simply are not making life better for the majority of people.


Replies

renjimen01/24/2025

Ditto. My non-tech friends ask what benefit AI has to society and I struggle to give them concrete examples that outweigh the opportunity cost of this kind of investment in more meaningful endeavors. Let alone the downsides of an algorithmically-driven society and the increasing environmental costs of AI workloads.

pms01/23/2025

Thank you for being the voice of reason.