Why Is This CEO Bragging About Replacing Humans with A.I.?

My parents and their generation suffers a lot from this, I feel. They grew up in a time (and in a country, I guess) where any information that they'd digest on TVs, newspapers, etc. came vetted officially or professionally. So, they kind of presume that everything they see online must be true because it's out there.

It's not like there was no garbage output before, but it's the scale at which it can be done nowadays that is the key, I think.

Right. It used to be that if you were an influential person you still had to think carefully about what you said in order to convince a journalist to cover it - and to ensure you got positive coverage.

Today's social media environment means there's no need to consider that at all. Just say stuff. The more attention-grabbing it is, the more likely it will be amplified - and if it gets buzz online the media will cover it too.

> Why Is This CEO Bragging About Replacing Humans with A.I.?

Because they want to get attention, ideally that leads to coverage in publications like the NY Times.

... and they have an IPO coming up, so getting the markets excited about betting on an "AI-first" company is a smart strategy. Lots of money out there looking to get in on the current bubble.

Update: yeah, from later in that story:

> A former Klarna manager, who left in 2022, said the rhetorical emphasis on A.I. was no accident. According to the manager, there was a sense within the company that Klarna had lost its sheen in the media and among investors, and that Mr. Siemiatkowski was desperate to get it back.

> The former manager said the A.I. story provided a lifeline at a time when Klarna was hoping to offer shares on the public markets. It demonstrated that the company was still on the cutting edge, and that it was shrinking not because it had faltered but because it had figured out how to replace humans with machines.

>>> Job-role compression makes humans more valuable: for example coding with LLMs frees you to think higher-level.

When will this begin to happen, and how will it manifest itself? I haven't seen any coders thinking at a higher level yet. Or myself for that matter.

You can do exactly that right now - just stop working. You don't have to. Nobody ever had to. Would the overall productive output of humanity for goods that matter drop significantly if you opt-out? Probably not at all.

The problem, though, is, a job secures your place in the goods distribution scheme, and the scheme in general rewards certain behaviours that lead to (sometimes outsized) gains for the broader society. So what's the new scheme is going to be?

It's not just wealth redistribution. It's keeping people busy. It's suppressing antisocial behaviour on massive scale. It's rewarding polite social interactions - and even basic hygiene. Recall the second half of the first COVID year, and how rapidly a good chunk of population degraded into absolute slobbery.

Surprisingly, it's a much easier question for China than it is for US. Privately owned AI is about as smart as privately owned nuclear weapons.

The gains of productivity do not trickle down like that. Where are the horses that used to pull carriages? We didn't let them run free, we got rid of them. So in so far as the means of production don't even need exploited workers to generate more capital, those workers will be removed from the equation. They won't get free food and housing to go do art and ride bikes from those who, right now, don't care they they have no food or no housing. That idea was never serious, but in 2025?

> All too often, the inventor is the Faustian idealist who wants to improve the world but fails in the face of harsh realities. If he wants to push through his ideas, he has to get involved with powers whose sense of reality is sharper and more pronounced. In today's world, without wishing to make a value judgment, such powers are primarily the military and managers.

-- Konrad Zuse

This isn't an engineering question. We could already live in a "Star Trek" kind a world (minus warp drive, teleportation and food replicators maybe) a long time ago, several times over. It's not for lack of productivity or inventions. We now have tech broligarchs in line with dismantling consumer and environment protections. Productivity keeps going up, so do profits for fewer and fewer, but the outlook for the average person, their share in a nice future, keeps shrinking. Technology that empowers the few that spy on, exploit, manipulate and eventually murder the masses is very different from technology that empowers people to get together and improve their lives. To all just sum it up as "tech" or "AI" is destroying all the detail. We live in the world we live in, not Star Trek.

> short term sacrifice is always entailed for long term gain

That's how every cult operates, too. That's what fascists say. Why not make the world better? Why do people have to be more disenfranchised, why do more children need to have developmental defects, why does there need to be more drug addiction, and hundreds of other things so nicely removed out of sight, out of mind, with the phrase "employability will suffer along the way", for something as wishy washy as "a star trek future"?

> "hmmm, will a future where nobody has to work be within the grasp of my children, or my grandchildren? think of the possibilities!"

If it's so great, why rush and break things, and not get there without making things worse, decade by decade, by instead reversing the trend of growing inequality? Just a little? Current generations have less than previous ones. Life expectancy in the US is going down. "Those who abused the power they already were given will suddenly play nice when they have ALL the power" is what it basically boils down to.

This is like saying the guy who punches me in the gut and says "give me your wallet, asshole", claims to pity for me when it turns out I have no wallet, and he suggests I get in his van so he can drive me to the villa of his friend with this great party that goes on forever, where I can eat and dance for the rest of my life, is the real deal. But when I say "okay, then give me the address and I'll go home, change clothes and show up there with my best friend", he gets SUPER IMPATIENT and kind of angry in a creepy way? Yeah, no.