Modern AI tools are amazing, but they’re amazing like spell check was amazing when it came out. Does it help with menial tasks? Yes, but it creates a new baseline that everyone has and just moves the bar. Theres scant evidence that we’re all going to just sit on a beach while AI runs your company anytime soon.
There’s little sign of any AI company managing to build something that doesn’t just turn into a new baseline commodity. Most of these AI products are also horribly unprofitable, which is another reality that will need to be faced sooner rather than later.
It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter? Or is it all just pointless busy-work invented since the industrial revolution to create jobs for everyone, when in reality we would be fine if like 5% of society worked while the rest slacked off? Don't think we'd have as many videogames, but then again, we would have time to play, which I would argue is more valuable than games.
To paraphrase Lee Iacocca:
We must stop and ask ourselves, how much videogames do we really need?
> It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter?
I recently retired from 40 years in software-based R&D and have been wondering the same thing. Wasn't it true that 95% of my life's work was thrown away after a single demo or a disappointingly short period of use?
And I think the answer is yes, but this is just the cost of working in an information economy. Ideas are explored and adopted only until the next idea replaces it or the surrounding business landscape shifts yet again. Unless your job is in building products like houses or hammers (which evolve very slowly or are too expensive to replace), the cost of doing of business today is a short lifetime for any product; they're replaced in increasingly fast cycles, useful only until they're no longer competitive. And this evanescent lifetime is especially the case for virtual products like software.
The essence of software is to prototype an idea for info processing that has utility only until the needs of business change. Prototypes famously don't last, and increasingly today, they no longer live long enough even to work out the bugs before they're replaced with yet another idea and its prototype that serves a new or evolved mission.
Will AI help with this? Only if it speeds up the cycle time or reduces development cost, and both of those have a theoretical minimum, given the time needed to design and review any software product has an irreducible minimum cost. If a human must use the software to implement a business idea then humans must be used to validate the app's utility, and that takes time that can't be diminished beyond some point (just as there's an inescapable need to test new drugs on animals since biology is a black box too complex to be simulated even by AI). Until AI can simulate the user, feedback from the user of new/revised software will remain the choke point on the rate at which new business ideas can be prototyped by software.
I think about this a lot with various devices I owned over the years that were made obsolete by smartphones. Portable DVD players and digital cameras are the two that stand out to me; each of them cost hundreds of dollars but only had a marketable life of about 5 years. To us these are just products on a shelf, but every one of them had a developer, an assembly line, and a logistics network behind them; all of these have to be redeployed whenever a product is made obsolete.
This is what makes software interesting. It theoretically works forever and has zero marginal production cost, but it's durability is driven by business requirements and hardware and OS changes. Some software might have a 20 year life. Some might only be 6 months.
A house is way more durable. My house is older than all software and I expect it to outlive most software written (either today or ever). Except voyager perhaps!
Yes... basically in life, you have to find the definition of "to matter" that you can strongly believe in. Otherwise everything feels aimless, the very life itself.
The rest of what you ponder in your comment is the same. And I'd like to add that baselines shifted a lot over the years of civilization. I like to think about one specific example: painkillers. Painkillers were not used during medical procedures in a widespread manner until some 150 years ago, maybe even later. Now, it's much less horrible to participate in those procedures, for everyone involved really, and also the outcomes are better just for this factor - because the patients moves around less while anesthetized.
But even this is up for debate. All in all, it really boils down to what the individual feels like it's a worthy life. Philosophy is not done yet.
Well, from a societal point of view, meaningful work would be work that is necessary to either maintain or push that baseline.
Perhaps my initial estimate of 5% of the workforce was a bit optimistic, say 20% of current workforce necessary to have food, healthcare, and maybe a few research facilities focused on improving all of the above?
I'm pretty sure it's not impossible, but rather just improbable, because of how human nature works. In other words, we are not incentivized to do that, and that is why we don't do that, and even when we did, it always fell apart.
You are very right that AI will not change this. As neither did any other productivity improvement in the past (directly).
It's impossible, and not just because of human nature. Even if humans were more cooperative or altruistic, it's impossible to plan for disruptive innovations.
Power itself seems to be the goal, and the reasons for it is human DNA I think. I have doubts that we can build anything different than this (on a sufficiently long run).
Mine doesn't, and I am fine with that, never needed such validation. I derive fulfillment from my personal life and achievements and passions there, more than enough. With that optics, office politics and promotion rat race and what people do in them just makes me smile. Seeing how otherwise smart folks ruin (or miss out) their actual lives and families in pursuit of excellence in a very narrow direction, often hard underappreciated by employers and not rewarded adequately. I mean, at certain point you either grok the game and optimize, or you don't.
The work brings over time modest wealth, allows me and my family to live in long term safe place (Switzerland) and builds a small reserve for bad times (or inheritance, early retirement etc. this is Europe, no need to save up for kids education or potentially massive healthcare bills). Don't need more from life.
Agree. Now I watch the rat racers with bemusement while I put in just enough to get a paycheck. I have enough time and energy to participate deeply in my children’s upbringing.
I’m in America so the paychecks are very large, which helps with private school, nanny, stay at home wife, and the larger net worth needed (health care, layoff risk, house in a nicer neighborhood). I’ve been fortunate, so early retirement is possible now in my early 40s. It really helps with being able to detach from work, when I don’t even care if I lose my job. I worry for my kids though. It won’t be as easy for them. AI and relentless human resources optimization will make tech a harder place to thrive.
Unless you propose slaves how are you going to choose the 5%?
Who in their right mind would work when 95 out of 100 people around them are slacking off all day? Unless you pay them really well. So well that they prefer to work than to slack off. But then the slackers will want nicer things to do in their free time that only the workers can afford. And then you'd end up at the start.
>It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter?
It mattered enough for someone to pay you money to do it, and that money put food on the table and clothes on your body and a roof over your head and allowed you to contribute to larger society through paying taxes.
Is it the same as discovering that E = MC2 or Jonas Salk's contributions? No, but it's not nothing either.
> Don't think we'd have as many videogames, but then again, we would have time to play, which I would argue is more valuable than games.
Would we have fewer video games? If all our basic needs were met and we had a lot of free time, more people might come together to create games together for free.
I mean, look at how much free content (games, stories, videos, etc) is created now, when people have to spend more than half their waking hours working for a living. If people had more free time, some of them would want to make video games, and if they weren’t constrained by having to make money, they would be open source, which would make it even easier for someone else to make their own game based on the work.
Nope. The current system may be misdirecting 95% of labor, but until we have sufficiently modeled all of nature to provide perfect health and brought world peace, there is work to do.
I've been thinking similarly. Bertrand Russell once said: "there are two types of work. One, moving objects on or close to the surface of the Earth. Two, telling other people to do so". Most of us work in buildings that don't actually manufacture, process or anything. Instead, we process information that describes manufacturing and transport. Or we create information for people to consume when they are not working (entertainment). Only a small faction of human beings are actually producing things that are necessary for physiological survival. Rest of us are at best, helping them optimize that process, or at worst, leeching off of them in the name of "management" of their work.
Most work is redundant and unnecessary. Take for example the classic gas station on every corner situation that often emerges. This turf war between gas providers (or their franchisees by proxy they granted a license to this location for) is not because three or four gas stations are operating at maximum capacity. No, this is 3 or 4 fisherman with a line in the river, made possible solely because inputs (real estate, gas, labor, merchandise) are cheap enough where the gas station need not ever run even close to capacity and still return a profit for the fisherman.
Who benefits from the situation? You or I who don’t have to make a u turn to get gas at this intersection, perhaps, but that is not much benefit in comparison for the opportunity cost of not having 3 prime corner lots squandered on the same single use. The clerk at the gas station for having a job available? Perhaps although maybe their labor in aggregate would have been employed in other less redundant uses that could benefit out society otherwise than selling smokes and putting $20 on 4 at 3am. The real beneficiary of this entire arrangement is the fisherman, the owner or shareholder who ultimately skims from all the pots thanks to having what is effectively a modern version of a plantation sharecropper, spending all their money in the company store and on company housing with a fig leaf of being able to choose from any number of minimum wage jobs, spend their wages in any number of national chain stores, and rent any number of increasingly investor owned property. Quite literally all owned by the same shareholders when you consider how people diversify their investments into these multiple sectors.
It's weird to read the same HN crowd that decries monopolies and extols the virtues of competition turn around and complain about job duplication and "bullshit jobs" like marketing and advertising that arise from competition.
Its why executive types are all hyped about AI. Being able to code 2x more will mean they get 2x more things (roughly speaking), but the workers aren’t going to get 2x the compensation.
Indeed. And AI does its work without those productivity-hindering things like need for recreation and sleep, ethical treatment, and a myriad of others. It's a new resource to exploit, and that makes everyone excited who is building on some resource.
AI can’t do our jobs today, but we’re only 2.5 years from the release of chatGPT. The performance of these models might plateau today, but we simply don’t know. If they continue to improve at the current rate for 3-5 more years, it’s hard for me to see how human input would be useful at all in engineering.
I dont think its especially unreasonable to assume that these models will continue to improve. Every year since chatGPT has seen incredible advancements, that will end eventually but why do you think it is now?
> Every year since chatGPT has seen incredible advancements
Advancements in what exact areas? My time using GitHub Copilot years ago was more successful for the simple act of coding than my more recent one trying out Cursor with Claude Sonnet 3.5. I'm not really seeing what these massive advancements have been, and realistically none of these LLMs are more useful than a very, very bad junior programmer when it comes to anything that couldn't already be looked up but is simply faster to ask.
> realistically none of these LLMs are more useful than a very, very bad junior programmer
This is an incredible achievement. 5 years ago chatbots and NLP AI couldnt do shit. 2 years ago they were worthless for programming. Last year they were only useful to programmers as autocomplete. Now they replace juniors. There has been obvious improvement year after year and it hasnt been minor
To the extent it’s measurable, LLMs are becoming more creative as the models improve. I think it’s a bold statement to say they’ll NEVER be creative. Once again, we’ll have to see. Creativity very well could be emergent from training on large datasets. But also it might not be. I recommend not speaking in such absolutes about a technology that is improving every day.
I agree, and I think most people would say the current models would rank low on creativity metrics however we define them. But to the main point, I don’t see how the quality we call creativity is unique to biological computing machines vs electronic computing machines. Maybe one day we’ll conclusively declare creativity to be a human trait only, but in 2025 that is not a closed question - however it is measured.
We were talking about LLM here, not computing machines in general. LLM are trained to mimic not to produce novel things, so a person can easily think LLM wont get creative even though some computer program in the future could.
Most software engineering jobs aren't about creativity, but about putting some requirements stated in a slightly vague fashion, and actualizing it for the stakeholder to view and review (and adjust as needed).
The areas for which creativity is required are likely related to digital media software (like SFX in movies, games, and perhaps very innovative software). In these areas, surely the software developer working there will have the creativity required.
NYC area real estate certainly isn’t cheap, but compared to the insanity on the west coast there’s a lot to like. NYC has really bounced back after COVID and is a real hub of activity again. Folks want to be a part of that.
Also the second home market for NYC is strong. Having a place in the city is a status symbol for many. Nobody cares if you have an apartment in the Bay Area or other cities with expensive property but lots of folks want a “small place” to spend weekends in NYC.
That all also keeps prices rising. Not saying it’s good, but betting against NYC real estate is not advisable.
The map still amusingly mostly pretends that New Jersey and transit running into New Jersey doesn’t exist. For example, the PATH is very faintly represented but yet the JFK AirTrain (which isn’t part of the subway and the airport isn’t run by the MTA) is given more prominent status. PATH is owned by the same entity (PANYNJ) that owns the AirTrain but is nearly hidden on the map because it goes to New Jersey.
Back when the SuperBowl was in NYC there was a full transmit map produced that acknowledged and displayed the existence of New Jersey and its transit into and out of NYC. After the Super Bowl the MTA quickly took it down and New Jersey was returned to its former “we’re gonna pretend like you don’t exist” map.
This is an MTA map, not a general “transit” map. Having the AirTrain on it is a bit of a bonus, but probably reflects (a) it being the most common question MTA gets and (b) it being more integrated with the rest of the MTA system than PATH (use of metrocard, etc).
Note that JFK airport is already within the regular bounds of the map; it doesn't require anything to be shifted to include that information.
New Jersey requires the map to be shifted to include it, which means either going to a larger map, or shrinking the existing content of the map. There's a cost to doing so, and that cost may not be worth the extra benefits providing that information would.
People cared about the OpenAI drama when it looked like they might have some real edge and the future of AI depended on them. Now it’s clear the tech is cool but rapidly converging into a commodity with nobody having any edge that translates into a sustainable business model.
In that reality they can drama all they want now, nobody really cares anymore.
Yes and the open source models + local inference are progressing rapidly.
This whole API idea is kind of limited by the fact that you need to RT to a datacenter + trust someone with all your data.
Imagine when OpenAI has their 23&me moment in 2050 and a judge rules all your queries since 2023 are for sale to the highest bidder.
Even worse for these LLM-as-a-service companies i that the utility of open source LLMs largely comes down to the customization: you can get a lot of utility by restricting token output, varying temperature, and lightly retraining them for specific applications.
The use-cases for LLMs seem unexplored beyond basic chatbot stuff.
I'm surprised at how little their utility for turning unstructured data into structured data, even with some margin of error, is discussed. It doesn't even take an especially large model to accomplish it, either.
I would think entire industries could reform around having an LLM as a first pass on data, with software and/or human error checking at significant cost reduction over previous strategies.
There's more to business than tech. There's more to business than product.
The software behind Facebook as an app wasn't particularly unique, yet it eclipsed the competition. The same could be said for Google. Google didn't even have any real lock-in for years, but it still owned consumer mindshare, which gave it the vast majority of search traffic, which made it one of the most valuable companies in the world.
ChatGPT is in a similar position. The fact of the matter is, the average person knows what ChatGPT is and how to use it. Many hundreds of millions of normal people use ChatGPT weekly, and the number is growing. The same cannot be said of Claude, DeepSeek, Grok, or the various open source models.
And the gap is massive. It's not even close. It's like 400M weekly ChatGPT actives vs 30M monthly Claude actives.
So yes, the average Hacker News contrarian who thinks their tiny bubble represents the entire world might think that "nobody cares," in part because nobody they know cares, and in part because that assessment aligns with their own personal biases and desires.
But anyone who's been paying attention to how internet behemoths grow for the past 30 years certainly still cares about OpenAI.
It gets more interesting the older I get seeing people speculate about the now vs. early internet without having lived through the 90s internet. My first response is "do you not remember what that was like?!" then I remember, no, in fact they might not have even been born yet.
You can't compare Facebook with ChatGPT because the costs per user are in totally different orders of magnitude. One $5/mo VPS can serve the traffic of several hundred thousand Facebook users, while ChatGPT needs an array of GPUs per active user. They can optimize this somewhat, but never as much as Facebook can.
This means that they're stuck with more expensive monetization plans to cover their free tier loss leader, hence the $200/mo Pro subscription. And once you're charging that kind of price to try to make ends meet, you're ripe for disruption no matter how good your name recognition.
"ChatGPT needs an array of GPUs per active user" - nit: you're exaggerating by a few orders of magnitude.
First, queries from users can be combined and fed into servers in batches so that hundreds of queries can be concurrently served by a single node. Second, people aren't on and asking ChatGPT questions every second of every day. I'd guess the median is more like ~single digit queries per day. Assuming average response length of 100 tokens and throughput of 50 tok/s at batch size 50, that's 25 QPS or 2.1M queries per day, or 420k users served per node at 5 queries per user per day.
Now, a single 8xH100 node is a lot more expensive than $5/mo, so you're directionally correct there, but I'd wager you can segment your market aggressively and serve heavily distilled/quantized models (small enough to fit onto single commodity GPUs, or even CPUs) to your free tier. Finally, this is subject to Huang's Law, which says every 2 years the cost of the same performance will more than halve.
People said similar things about Facebook. "Oh their user growth might be amazing, but they're not making any money, it's not a real business."
But it turns out that with enough funding, you can prioritize growth over profit for a very long time. And with enough growth, you can raise unlimited funds before you get to that point. And going this route is smart and effective if you want to get to a $1T valuation in under a decade.
So yeah, ChatGPT's margins might not be as high as Facebook's. But it doesn't really matter at this point, they're in growth mode. What matters is whether or not they'll be able to turn their lead and their mindshare into massive profits eventually, and while we can speculate on that, it's far too early to definitively say the answer is no.
Rather than getting into the nitty gritty details of monetization, when we ask ourselves if OpenAi can nail product like Facebook did (I guess) to become the next tech giant, I think we have to ask whether it's even possible when the tech industry is as established as it is.
You would think existing megacaps would be all over any new market if there is a profit to be made. Facebook's competition was basically other startups. That said, Google seems to be dropping the ball almost as bad as Yahoo.
But sure, if there's absolutely no way to make money from consumer AI then that will also make it hard for oai to win the game.
> Google didn't even have any real lock-in for years, but it still owned consumer mindshare, which gave it the vast majority of search traffic, which made it one of the most valuable companies in the world.
This isn't correct at all. Google's search engine was an important stepping stone to the behavior that actually gave them lock-in, which was an aggressive, anti-competitive and generally illegal effort to monopolize the market for online advertising through acquisitions and boxing out competitors.
It really was only possible because for reasons we decided to completely stop enforcing antitrust laws for a decade or two.
400 million use it for free, you can give away 400 million of anything for free.
The question is, how many are willing to pay the monthly fee required to stop OpenAI from bleeding 5billion/year and return the promised trillions to investors.
Regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are, can you please make your substantive points thoughtfully? This was not a good Hacker News comment, and you've unfortunately been doing this repeatedly lately.
OpenAI is spending $2 for every $1 it earns. It's certainly eating its investors' lunch, but it's not a sustainable business yet and from all accounts doesn't have a clear plan for how to become one.
Meanwhile, the ZIRP policies that made this kind of non-strategy strategy feasible are gone.
I wouldn't worry. Retracting ZIRP policies gave governments 2 choices: reduce spending by ~10% on average (in Europe), or cheat and scheme to bring them back, on a 2 year timer.
Interest rates raised, but came back down before the 2 years were even up (rate rise started 27 Jul 2022, Started coming back down 12 Jun 2024), governments have been caught cheating, and the number of central bankers replaced has gone up dramatically. Oh, and none of the governments have reduced spending. Literally not a single one. In fact, Germany has agreed to an unprecedented increase in debt financing of their government.
In other words, ZIRP, even negative rates, are coming back, and a lot sooner than most people think. Your next house, despite everything that's happened, will be more expensive. But I doubt this will save either OpenAI or Tesler.
So there’s AI that’s really good at doing the skills we’re hiring for. We want you to not use AI so we can hire you for a job that we’re saying we’re going to replace with AI. Sounds like a great plan.
No. Using AI requires a depth of knowledge to spot the mistakes in the generated. code, and to know how to fit all the snippets of code in to something that works.
We need to know that the developer actually has skills and isn't just secretly copying the answer off of a hidden screen. We are interviewing now, and some cantidates are obviously cheating. Our interview process is not leet code based, and reasonably chill, but we will probably have to completely rethink the process.
Since we are hiring contractors, in theory we can let them go after a couple months if they suck, but we haven't tested out how this will work in practice.
The DEI stuff though is gone and isn’t coming back. The concept was well intentioned but, quite ironically, these programs turned into a hub of biased discriminatory behavior and it was becoming increasingly hard to paint them as anything else.
> these programs turned into a hub of biased discriminatory behavior
Professional sports went through a "DEI" phase. Despite some rough patches, I'd say that it worked out for the better as a whole if you look at it in retrospect.
Similarly, individual companies may have fumbled DEI initiatives, but years on, I think it will have had a (small) positive impact.
DEI created a lot of bad blood and even more prejudices than before. People will be accused of being DEI hires for years and some groups are now under more heavy scrutiny than before. Sure, if you reduce your perspective on the prevalence of your own artificial metrics like skin color, the numbers might look better.
The concept of using discrimination against discrimination wasn't even new, but it was never successful. Quite analogous to violence for that matter.
All in all it was a vanity project and it destroyed trust in academia and the press that defended such initiatives, pushed for censorship and tried to dictate language rules. I would argue that the political costs were quite immense and the effects still persist today given the shift towards more right leaning parties throughout the western world.
Time will tell indeed. Question is if any progress could reasonably be attributed to DEI or happened despite of it. Compared to universal humanism DEI just had worse ideas and I think those need to be overcome. And all parties need to overcome them, not only the most obvious opposition.
How does professional sports go through a DEI phase?? Professional sports are one of the few true meritocracies in the world, where the best players, no matter their race, religion or gender, will play.
I’m guessing you’re referring to Colin Kaepernick? The dude went 2-14 his last year in the NFL! 2-14!!! That fact always seems to be left out by people claiming “racism”. The fact that he didn’t get another job is because sports is a meritocracy and he sucked, not because of his race or any DEI issue.
Wow, your counterpoint is about discrimination in sports 80 YEARS ago. Barely anyone alive even remembers segregated baseball firsthand. You seem to be backing my point even more that sports have been a true meritocracy for many generations now.
I have a more nuanced take on whether professional sports are actually a meritocracy. It depends on the level at which you look. Yes, in any given event it’s generally fair to say the rules are equitable. However, look at golf - we can either accept white people have some genetic advantage, or that access is not equal and the best talent never got a chance to develop. This could be extended to other leagues as well.
Access is not equal or interest is not equal? Minority participation in golf skyrocketed after Tiger Woods, but I’d argue the best athletes still far preferred basketball, football, etc over golf. Your argument also falls apart if you look at golf as a whole, where Asian women dominate the LPGA.
Coaching hires and selection process in more recent history.
I'd also argue that Venus and Serena Williams were a prerequisite to Coco Gauff. That's the point of representation: to make it easier for the meritocracy to work by creating a path for talent that might otherwise not consider a field (or sport, in this case). In many cases with minorities, what we see are extraordinary individuals who are able to shatter these biases and be pathmakers for others to follow. Jeremy Lin has also talked a lot about his experiences with racism all along his journey to the NBA (racism and prejudice is just a form of exclusion).
But it's ironic, right? Professional sports is a meritocracy that for decades excluded other non-white races from participating. The only reason we can call it a merit based system today is because there were strong efforts by individuals and organizations throughout the 20th century to make it inclusive, you know, the "I" in "DEI". You cannot have a functional meritocracy if individuals are being excluded from participating.
There's this assumption that certain races or genders are just better at coding or engineering or finance or math and that these fields are already merit based. Isn't it more likely that these fields still suffer greatly from the same type of prejudiced exclusion that professional sports suffered from and that "non-conforming" talent is being excluded at the candidate prospecting phase?
> Professional sports is a meritocracy that for decades excluded other non-white races from participating
I’m sorry, you don’t get to argue that modern sports aren’t a true meritocracy because of policies that existed 80 years ago. You’re also putting too much into the selection process, implying that there’s active efforts to exclude, for example, blacks from hockey. I’d argue it’s more a result of cultural preferences - basketball and football see much higher participation and enthusiasm.
I didn't argue that modern sports aren't a meritocracy; the exact opposite. Modern sports are a meritocracy at the player level precisely because of the efforts to make it inclusive in the 20th century. Look at the sport of baseball, basketball, and football in the early 20th century. Look at the history of racism and exclusion in each of these sports and the efforts by extraordinary individuals to shift them towards merit and not race. The Negro Leagues were a thing not that long ago.
Modern sports at the coaching level is a more recent shift to meritocracy through a concerted effort to include minority candidates in the hiring process. It is only a meritocracy today because of extraordinary individuals like Jackie Robinson breaking the barriers and decades of integration.
> ...there’s active efforts to exclude, for example, blacks from hockey.
Exclusion works in many ways. Two of which are access and socioeconomic stratification. The reason why there aren't many minority hockey players can probably be easily traced to access and socioeconomic reasons. Go on Google Maps and search for ice rinks and then basketball courts. Find a "free" community ice rink. Now go find free community basketball courts, soccer fields, or any open space for football. There simply aren't as many ice rinks where there are minority populations are concentrated and the cost of access is high compared to alternatives like soccer, football, baseball, and basketball. The process is self-selecting and exclusionary through lack of access and cost.
Isn’t this the opposite of DEI then? There’s “momentum” in sports - kids want to play what their heroes play, Dominicans have Dominican baseball heroes and play baseball. There’s nothing DEI about that.
The process is self-selecting because it is not merit based; it is based on access and economic factors. It's not that black Americans or Hispanic Americans have no talent for hockey, it's that they have no access so the sport is "self-selecting" wealthier, white athletes who have access and the economics to start and sustain the sport from a young age. To make this a meritocracy, it requires inclusion (I'm not advocating for this, but simply as a thought experiment). Imagine if every community had plenty of free ice rinks on the same order as basketball courts. Do you think the racial composition of the sport of hockey would remain the same?
Tiger Woods would not be Tiger Woods if his dad didn't have access to Navy golf courses.
If you think the reason we don't see many Dominican hockey players is because they have no talent for the sport and not because of access, then well, I don't think this conversation is of any use; you already have it in your mind that because professional hockey is predominantly white, only white players have the merit or talent for the sport.
If you don't have access, it is not a meritocracy. That is the intent of DEI: to improve access and enable meritocracy.
The practice of DEI at any individual org is a different story.
> If you don't have access, it is not a meritocracy.
I think you’re running into resistance because of this stance.
You’re talking about an optimized meritocracy or a meritocracy at one level of abstraction in which raw talent is able to be manifested due to optimal (or at least good enough) access. This sort of definition might fly in certain academic circles, but it doesn’t fly outside of those circles.
For most folks, “meritocracy”, by which people are selected based on ability, refers to actualized talent rather than theoretical talent. In your case of Dominican ice hockey players, I think most people think that their absence from the NHL does not compromise whatever meritocracy the NHL is (it has other issues), rather it’s merely that most/all Dominican ice hockey talent hasn’t been actualized to a point that it can be professionally competitive.
Bringing this back to DEI, improving access doesn’t really “enable meritocracy”, rather it just makes a meritocracy utilize its available resources more efficiently.
Also, a side note about the failings of DEI discussions outside of academic circles…
Individuals (e.g., NHL team owners) have a great deal of agency in ensuring that the players on their team are more or less chosen by meritocratic standards. These same individuals have much less agency in actualizing ice hockey talent in every place in the world (massive undertaking). As such, they may bristle when their system is accused of being non-meritocratic or non-inclusive because of societal issues that they don’t really have any or much agency to change.
Don’t get me wrong… discussions of underutilized talent are absolutely fascinating. The US in particular is absolutely flooded with underutilized talent, and there have been times in my life when I’ve been able to move the needle in certain organizations about how they tapped into that underutilized talent.
That said, labeling people or orgs as “racist” or “non-meritocratic” just doesn’t fly when the issue is structural rather than something that they actually have direct control of.
There was a zero chance the company with the best AI LLM models would not get involved in weaponization, willingly or not.
DAI is going to be one of the first things the next administration brings back, mark my words. Saying it's discriminatory is like saying affirmative action is discriminatory
Affirmative action is discriminatory. It is literally discriminating between different people based on sex, race, religion, or gender identity. You can argue it's good discrimination, but it is by definition discrimination.
But its absence demonstrably leads to discrimination based on the same things through subconscious bias. At least with it in place you get fairer spread of people being affected.
If you want to discriminate for the greater good, you elevate yourself above others. The only thing you could do is to take a step back yourself instead of forcing others to do so.
If you cannot restrict yourself to that, you are as bad as those that discriminate without further reflection.
If you don't "discriminate for the greater good" (your phrasing, not mine) and you are part of the dominant group who benefits from not doing so then you also elevate yourself above others. That is not a morally superior choice.
Personally I do take that step back. I would consider myself a violent person if I did not. I look around and I see my peers choosing not to work towards dismantling the systems that privelege themselves and I consider their inaction a form of violence against people who are already struggling. I am not American so I can't speak for the culture there but in my society there is a general acceptance of using collective power to limit the violence of individuals, and even more so when there is such an evident power disparity.
No, it would not be morally superior and it is commendable if you do take a step back. But to remove discrimination you have to leave others to make their choice too.
> I consider their inaction a form of violence against people who are already struggling.
To help people in need, you do not have to put them in groups first. This grouping is already discrimination. I would say literally, but the term is a bit overused. But the good thing is that you never need discrimination to alleviate injustices.
Any argument for social security policies and everything that remotely fits under that umbrella does not need discrimination. In fact it would work much better without it or using discrimination as a justification. It even undermines the argument for it.
> To help people in need, you do not have to put them in groups first.
I don't "put" them in groups. I recognise that we are all put into groups by the systemic nature of society. I also recognise the active grouping of others who feel that they are disadvantaged and try to listen to various advocacy groups who again and again ask for me to "use my privilege" to help. The idea of choosing not to do that but rather to respond with "your sense of Otherness is constructed, just let it go and don't worry about this group or that group" would feel both cruel and absurd.
> Any argument for social security policies and everything that remotely fits under that umbrella does not need discrimination.
Again you're the one framing this as discrimination. Something I would advocate for in my workplace is bias training, where people can learn to spot unconscious biases in themselves and can learn about the effects of systemic inequality on the individual and societal levels. I think it would be difficult to argue that such actions are "discriminatory."
I understand that the conversation is about specific DEI legislation and I have to admit that I am not American and am not familiar with the minutia of what was enacted there. But I am specifically responding to the idea that any action taken to combat implicit discrimination will lead to explicit discrimination.
There's the example of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra which I always think back on. They opened up to allow women to join but after some years no woman had managed to get a position on merit. Eventually a blind audition was introduced and the split quickly became reflective of broader societal demographics. To my mind it feels like many people here are jumping to say that blind auditions are discriminatory because they im some way disadvantaged the white men who "looked like" professional musicians. In some way that is true but it feels like such a warped reading of reality to me that I struggle to advocate for my own views in the face of it.
One simple thing we do at my company is to scrub things like names from applications, so that John Smith doesn't get preference to Aphiwe Mvala because of the ease/familiarity of the name. Would I advocate for mandating that practice in public jobs? Most certainly, I don't see why not, especially if I see the outright discrimination scandals such as [0] that can result from overly homogeneous institutions. Is the argument really that John is discriminated against with this policy?
A recent Gallup poll has reported that "...Support for a more moderate Democratic Party among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents has grown by 11 percentage points, to 45%, since 2021..." so the Democrats seem to be headed in that direction.
DEI got an extreme level of support from NGOs even while Trump was the president that they won't have at the next election. I hope they can renew themselves.
The good news on the left side though that I don't think the next candidate could be worse than Kamala Harris.
my guess is any new administration would realize it’s a massive political loser.
i’m personally in favor of some limited AA in unis, but if even black people are majority against AA when polled… it’s definitely not coming back. might be that this changes once minority groups realize how much of an impact it was actually having, i think a large segment of people convinced themselves that a lot more of these admissions were by pure merit than is supported by the data.
> these programs turned into a hub of biased discriminatory behavior and it was becoming increasingly hard to paint them as anything else
The last corporate DEI initiative I was pulled into was so blatantly discriminatory that many of us were scrambling to remove ourselves from hiring roles as quickly as possible.
One of the few times I’ve been speechless in a meeting was when someone proudly told us they had just rejected a perfect candidate for the role because they were a man and not a minority, and we “had enough of those”. This was followed by a debate about whether Asians qualified as a minority in the context of a tech company.
I started working on my exit from that company as quickly as possible. These were ex-FAANG executives but they had been out of FAANG long enough that they likely came up with these ideas on their own, I think.
To be honest, I’ve been very hesitant to even talk about that situation in person because it’s such a minefield.
DEI did feel a lot like paying off debt by getting a new credit card. Equal competition doesn’t mean equal footing though. We will eventually need something to replace it and I hope that doesn’t go worse.
Does it? My "I just want the best for everyone" side likes to think being consciously and explicitly open to all candidates, having a women's day on stereotypical men's jobs, quotas, etc., makes things better because you get more perspectives in your org. Your business/government is more likely to cater to the whole population if it's lead by a reflection of the whole population and all that. But I don't actually know if anyone ran the numbers on that. You seem to suggest it's like taking on debt — is it? I'd be interested. As I do want the best for everyone, if my intuition is wrong then that's also useful to know about and adjust my opinion on
One plane crash is also n=1 for whether the maintenance interval of the element that failed should increase, not n=num_victims, since there's only one aircraft that failed after all. Here, it's one organisation
I'm not asking for data points to do a study into individual companies applying their policies and compiling anecdotal results to do statistical or qualitative tests on all by myself in spare time when there's people being paid to do this properly. I was wondering if someone knew if the evidence has already been compiled and we know the overall effect, rather than stories which are surely plenty on both sides (assuming we agree that racism and other biases are not legitimate selection reasons, thus there being a reason to push against them). The question is: where is the balance? What policy creates the greatest median happiness in the population, all else being equal? This isn't trivial to determine, I can't do that by myself in an afternoon based on a few news reports of individual cases
Just to be a bit more clear, this was more a Chesterton Fence comment than a condemnation. Everything has trade-offs and I hope our next solution to this problem is better, not worse.
They are also now illegal by executive order which is the main reason companies are getting rid of them. I agree with you they were biased but companies don't care about that
> [The executive order] also instructs the U.S. attorney general to create a plan that would deter the private sector from continuing DEI programs.
So while it is not technically illegal yet, seems like they are getting ahead of that issue before it may arise based on pretty strong signaling that it will
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic here, but even if so: This phrasing is too close to just spreading a pro-Trump lie outright.
Better to say that companies are avoiding these policies because a wannabe dictator has thrown a hissy fit about them while CCing everyone on the email.
It's analogous to "working toward the führer" and, like most historical content about the rise of the Nazis, the parallels with today's USA are haunting.
DEI stands for "diversity, equity and inclusion", discriminatory hiring is a pretty extreme misinterpretation of those three words. It's no doubt true that somebody out there decided that the way to achieve the aim of a diverse/equitable/inclusive workplace was discriminatory hiring, but it's not the only way to get there, and it's not how most workplaces were going about it.
at pretty much every large tech company there were interview quotas imposed, top down pressure on hiring decisions.. it matches pretty closely what universities did
DEI is not about preferential hiring. It’s the opposite. It’s about broadening the perspectives so that one group that has enjoyed historical preferential hiring no longer gets preferential treatment.
I think the point is that a big bunch of studies really point to the fact that if you have two persons with a real merit score of 8/10 (for example), the one from a minority will be considered, due to unconscious biases, as having a score of 7/10 instead.
So, yes, there is a correction and this correction is based on race because this is the correct variable to de-bias the evaluation. But does it mean "preferential"? The point is to correct the evaluation such that this evaluation is not preferential and is neutral with respect to the race.
Except we're seeing the opposite in the real world.
Let me give you a scenario. It's the 1940's, a company has a policy that privileges white applicants. Someone says, "let's remove this policy, and tell the company they have to treat all applicants easily." Someone else replies, "no, because if this company was told they had to treat everyone equally and not privilege white people they would discriminate against white people. I have many studies proving this!"
Does that pass the smell test? A company that's intentionally trying to privilege group X is suddenly going to discriminate against group X if they're told they have to treat everyone equally?
In your scenario, if they indeed have convincing and independent studies proving this, then, yes, they should not remove this policy.
It is also worth mentioning that in real life, we apply such policies. If I remember correctly, black people are more prone to prostate cancer, and therefore there are policies that "discriminate": the process for cancer screening is different between black and white people. Does it mean it is racist? Does it mean it is unfair?
I think the difference is that I focus on equality of opportunity while you focus on equality of outcome. You are targeting "when looking at the process, I want to see everyone treated the same". Others may target "when looking at the opportunities, I want to see everyone with the same merit having the same probabilities of success". It reminds me of the famous cartoon of people wanting to watch a football game over a fence. The drawing illustrates that "treating everyone the same" without considering that not everyone starts from the same situation is stupid.
i’m very familiar with the arguments around DEI/AA. as i said in a different comment, i’m in favor of limited AA.
We have little data from jobs for various reasons - but if we look at the data from universities, the “correction” is clearly far in excess of any bias by race against same score candidates, which is why URM admits typically have significantly lower scores. It is only a correction if you are saying that it is also correcting for a lot more upstream stuff that might be causing the divergence in scores. There might be merit to the claim but it does also mean that the end result is you are picking worse candidates “on paper” on the basis of their skin color.
> i’m very familiar with the arguments around DEI/AA. as i said in a different comment, i’m in favor of limited AA.
You were saying "maybe that’s okay, but that is absolutely what it means".
Now you are saying that DEI/AA is not preferential, some applications of it are.
> but if we look at the data from universities, the “correction” is clearly far in excess of any bias by race against same score candidates
You cannot easily compare such numbers, and in this case, "clearly far in excess" is just totally subjective. This is typically where biases and cognitive dissonance are the most easy to creep in.
> There might be merit to the claim but it does also mean that the end result is you are picking worse candidates “on paper” on the basis of their skin color.
But if you don't apply any correction, you are picking worse candidates "on paper" on the basis of their skin color.
That the fundamental flaw of people who are so vocal about the over-correction of DEI/AA: they care a lot about over-correcting but don't seem to care that much about under-correcting. Over-correcting is a big injustice, under-correcting is just something that may happen, hey, what can you do, right?
This is just another justification for discrimination. You can be sure that everyone that discriminates has their own reasoning.
I doubt that studies in this field are less biased for that matter but they certainly lack hard substantial data.
You yourself are free to take a step back for someone you deem disadvantaged. If you demand this from others, you are just as plainly discriminating. I would argue that you overstep your bounds.
The problem is that "let's not apply the correction" is also just another justification for discrimination.
Let's approach the problem theoretically. Let's imagine a distant planet where, by construction of our thought experiment, there are 2 groups, A and B, and when evaluated for a job position, people of group A are scored as "their real score plus a random value sampled from a gaussian centered on 1" and people of group B are scored as "their real score minus a random value sampled from a gaussian centered on 1".
In this world, without correction, just using the evaluated score, there is discrimination: for the same merit (or sometimes even when they merit it more), people of group B will usually not be chosen when competing with a person of group A.
In this world, the corrected evaluation score is not biased anymore, even despite the fact that the correction is based on which group they belong to.
Now, we can come back to our reality. You are saying that these biases don't exist, or are smaller than what I think. Great. I'm saying that these biases exist or are bigger than what you think. Your position is not better than mine.
As for the "overstep your bounds", what you are basically saying is that "if you think there is something unfair, it does not count, I'm the only one allowed to decide what is fair or unfair". I'm pretty sure that it exists things that you find unfair and that you don't accept when you are the victim of the unfair situation. And I'm pretty sure that you can, for each case, find individuals that will argue that they don't find it unfair. In this case, be honest, will you really say "I think you are treating me unfairly, but if you think it's not the case, I cannot demand you to change anything or force anything to get retribution, because it will be overstepping my bounds"?
> The problem is that "let's not apply the correction" is also just another justification for discrimination.
No, that is not true, you have changed the statement. The statement was "let's not apply discrimination". You just reframe your discrimination as something different, in this case a "correction".
> In this world, the corrected evaluation score is not biased anymore, even despite the fact that the correction is based on which group they belong to.
Wrong, you do not "correct" discrimination and instead argue to implement it.
> You are saying that these biases don't exist, or are smaller than what I think.
I did no such thing. You set yourself up to be the judge of which discrimination is justified. I said you are not equipped to do that. You are free to take a step back and give your advantages up for others. That is very commendable and perhaps your deeds bring about the corrected world in your example.
> Your position is not better than mine.
I don't argue anything like that. I just said that you cannot be the judge to determine who deserves discrimination.
Even with applying groups in your hypothetical example you apply discrimination, a group as an abstract representation of the individual. Your whole argument cannot stand on its own without discrimination and the reasoning is inherently circular.
> if you think there is something unfair, it does not count
Again, I am saying nothing like that. I fully support relieves to the poor, financial support for education and several sensible policies. But I don't argue about fairness or what someone deserves and I cannot judge who is up for a bigger part of the pie in the contrast to someone other. And I believe neither are you or some alleged "discrimination experts".
Please don't be so aggressive. I did not take your statement, I was just saying that in the situation where there is a need of a correction, not applying the correction is also a justification for discrimination.
The question is "do we need a correction", and it is a very tricky question, and people who jump on "of course no" usually are just careless and don't realise that they put themselves as "the judge who decide what is fair and what is not", as much as the person who says "yes it needs a correction".
> You set yourself up to be the judge of which discrimination is justified. I said you are not equipped to do that.
My point is that if you judge that it does not need a correction, then you are doing exactly the same as me: you judge which discrimination is justified.
> I just said that you cannot be the judge to determine who deserves discrimination.
But that's exactly my point: if you just say "obviously there is no need for correction, obviously the default value is neutral", you are judging that the needed correction is 0. How is that not as bad as me if I judge that the needed correction is 1.
> I fully support relieves to the poor, financial support for education and several sensible policies.
But you are therefore discriminating: you give advantages to the poor that you don't give to the rich. How is that different?
> And I believe neither are you or some alleged "discrimination experts".
But I haven't said that I support any concrete DEI/AA. For all you know, I'm opposed to all the DEI/AA you have in mind, and just support the same policies as you about the poor and the sensible policies.
I think that in fact we are exactly the same. All I'm saying is that everyone, including you, end up applying "corrections" to reach fairness (decided by them or not, it does not matter). And that the choice "the correction should be 0" is as much a "choice of discriminating to a given level" than the choice "the correction should be 1".
White men in the U.S. have a hard time coming to grips with living in a society where women have sexual autonomy and where they are subjected to genuine competition for jobs. Every POC hire over a white man must be becuase of DEI!
It’s easy to demonize DEI for the reasons I stated above. It’s because I don’t follow the news media that I haven’t fallen for the DEI Scare that has gripped white society. It’s modern America’s version of blaming everything on communism.
We live in a society where no one calls a wholly unqualified moron like Hegseth a “DEI hire” but people referred to Karine Jean-Pierre as such.
1. in practice, does “DEI”/AA typically mean using race to influence hiring decisions? i think the answer is unequivocally yes, not taking a position on the merit of doing so.
2. Has “DEI” become some sort of boogeyman that is almost equivalent to communism of a past era? Yes, I agree with you - it has really accelerated in the past year and people are using it in ways that don’t even make any sense or blaming it for things that clearly are unrelated.
But I never made a claim of the 2nd form. Hegseth is obviously a nepo hire, most plum book positions in general are nepo hires.
So my comment then wasn’t directed to you. It was directed to those with more extreme views on what DEI means and to those reading. Apologies for casting too wide a net.
That’s a circular definition; stating it’s not about preferential hiring but then saying it’s about not giving a certain demographic preferential treatment.
“Enjoyed” is not the right word either. It’s better explained by stating the tech industry is dominated by certain demographics because that’s just how it is, and DEI initiatives give preferential treatment to those who are not in those demographics, in an attempt to increase diversity, and give equitable opportunities, and make people feel included.
For the last 500 years white men have had preferential treatment when it came to hiring. Indeed a stronger word than “enjoyed” is merited. But you think using “enjoyed” is too strong a word to use to describe such a state of affairs?
> It’s better explained by stating the tech industry is dominated by certain demographics because that’s just how it is
Bigots have used that one forever, defining the current state of affairs as natural and any attempt to improve things as <insert loaded term of the time here>.
great reply and i think hits on what i was trying to get at which is it is obviously discriminatory, but the merits of that discrimination are quite possibly positive or certainly up for debate.
It depends which side you look at it from. Increasing diversity of the group being hired into, means that a potentially discriminatory hiring approach must be taken, depending on the candidate applying.
I’d assume that demographics should somewhat match real demographics. If your country is 50% white people and 50% black people, you’d see that in hiring in general with some variance.
You’d probably have to adjust for socioeconomic level etc. It’s no good if all the hires in the low paying jobs are one type of people.
I don’t think it’s impossible to tell even if “99%” is hyperbole.
> I’d assume that demographics should somewhat match real demographics.
At work? I doubt that. Only for a job available to anyone and chosen by everyone. I don't think there's any jobs even roughly like that.
People get jobs and then their social and professional network now has someone who works at $BIGCO. Now folks can see themselves there and apply for openings, which could accelerate this effect. Now you can see minorities hired on merit, showing up in clusters.
> I don’t think it’s impossible to tell even if “99%” is hyperbole.
I dunno - it just seems like "majority ethnicity implies merit, minority implies DEI" to me.
People remember famous scientists like Einstein, Feynman, or even Bill Nye the Science Guy, and believe it's obvious that white men are more qualified in STEM, and anyone denying it is in denial. They ignore that before the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, discrimination was legal in the US, and that Ivy League universities only started admitting women from 1969 to 1981 (depending on the university).
People who say they can tell the percentage of DEI hires on sight—up to two significant digits from a data set, like "99%"—imagine that the past was a meritocracy, because they never grew past these simple stories to encourage children to pursue science.
Is it an accident that your example consists of three Jewish people and would you argue that they did receive less discrimination compared to other demographics regarding access to education?
The Nazis, who were white supremacists, persecuted Einstein and dismissed his theory of relativity as "Jewish science". Einstein fled to the US, which was a much less racist environment compared to Nazi Germany, and Einstein's theory helped the US create the atomic bomb that defeated the Nazis.
The US had a "Jewish quota" to limit the number of Jews allowed in universities, so "white" Jews experienced more discrimination than white Christians. However, racial segregation between white and black people was legal until 1954-1964, so white Jews generally experienced less discrimination compared to black people.
If Germany and the US wasn't so racist, science would have advanced further than it is today. Famous Jewish scientists (and science communicators) proved that white supremacy was wrong, not right.
> white Jews generally experienced less discrimination compared to black people.
Perhaps. And yet your initial statement would assume that you would want to discriminate against them.
This is more or less exactly what I believe DEI policies would lead to. There are enough people that believe Jews are advantaged but the opposite is mostly true. Still under the metrics DEI generally proposes they would need to be discriminated against.
This is why having the premise to treat everyone equally is the better solution than what DEI proposes. And criticism of DEI is not white supremacy.
Einstein moved to the US well after he became a famous scientist. The University of Zurich, where he got his degree, has been open to women since the mid 19th century.
The Ivy League first started admitting women in 1870 (Cornell). The rest, however, were far later.
Being a DEI hire does not make the hire discriminatory. I think you don’t understand the issue.
I gather you assume any person of color or female hire is a “DEI” hire and by that you mean someone who isn’t qualified. This assumption is quite stupid.
> The concept was well intentioned but, quite ironically, these programs turned into a hub of biased discriminatory behavior and it was becoming increasingly hard to paint them as anything else.
I think the programs basically did nothing. They were ineffective. Yet, that made a lot of people really angry.
Nice overview. The challenge ahead for “AI” companies is that it appears there’s really no technical moat here. Someone comes out with something amazing and new and within months (if not weeks or days) it’s quickly copied. That environment where everything quickly becomes a commodity is a recipe for many/most companies in this space to quickly get washed out as it becomes economically unviable to play in such an environment.
The money is still flowing, for now, to subsidize that fiasco but as soon as that starts to slow, even just a bit, things are gonna get bumpy real quick. Super excited about this tech but there are dark storm clouds building on the horizon and absent a major “moat” breakthrough it’s gonna get rough soon.
Not necessarily. The playbook of what tends to happen is first a bunch of players go bust in the race to the bottom, then the survivors are free to raise prices a bit when others realize there’s not much point in entering a race to the bottom. Those left then let quality slip as competition cools.
That’s exactly what happened with rideshare companies. It was an amazing new thing but subsidized in an unsustainable way, then a bunch of companies exited the space when it was an commoditized race to the bottom and those left let quality slip. Now when you order an Uber a car shows up that smells bad and has wheels about to fall off. The consumer experience was a lot better when Uber was a VC subsidized bonanza
There’s little sign of any AI company managing to build something that doesn’t just turn into a new baseline commodity. Most of these AI products are also horribly unprofitable, which is another reality that will need to be faced sooner rather than later.