I'm not that young anymore but when I hear Dario Amodei speak and gesticulate enthusiastically about how AI will soon make my job redundant, from a positio of someone who can retire now and who benefits from AI possibly replacing workers, it's very hard to like him.
How oblivious are people to the world that they think this is somehow strange or hard to believe? Why would they like any of the tech CEOs, or CEOs in general?
It's hard to see why basically anyone would at this point.
These popularity contests are won and lost based on marketing content on TikTok. If the opinions of young people were relevant they'd be appropriately shifted on demand. Few of them are reasoned positions so they can be shifted one way or the other with targeted advertising.
The Butlerian Jihad is coming. It will happen sooner than we think. It will start with Australia, where the popular vote matters the most for political power. “Vote for the Greens! We’ll ban AI! We’ll bring your jobs back! Your savings account will earn interest again! The AI scams will stop!” All false promises, of course. The laws will be pathetic: “Prohibited digital intelligence — any digital system capable of learning, adapting, remembering, recalling, generating, or interpreting information of a textual, visual, audio, interactive or other form.” It will be the Minister’s choice regarding which companies are in the (new) enforcement agency’s crosshairs. Misunderstood situations (like a Tesla running over a child that it didn’t detect) will be used as the war cry. “AI is dangerous! AI cannot be trusted! AI is being used by criminals!”
Young people don't know who AI CEOs are without the media apparatus teaching them AI is bad.
I've watched journalists dunk on this tech since the days of Tacotron. They love to dish out hate and venom and crystalize it around concepts that are easy to sell.
Not that the Dario and Sam haven't both been deliberately hyperbolic and made themselves easy targets, but the media was always attempting to do this.
Journalists hate AI and they always have.
We've seen them try dozens, if not hundreds of things to get the story to stick. Lately it's data centers being built and the stories of neighbors complaining about noise.
As much as I blame Sam for getting people angry at him, journalists also contributed to radicalizing people against him and turning him into an assassination target.
This headline is literally trying to reinforce this.
A significant portion of the population didn't need journalists feeding them a negative opinion.
More people alive today are educated in computer science than ever before. The same is true of epistemology, linguistics, and broader philosophy. Many have also lived long enough to see previous waves of AI come and go.
People were already watching the topic closely over a decade ago with DeepMind, AlphaGo, etc. None of the arguments against the current AI methods are new. People were poking holes in statistical methods centuries ago.
Mainstream media just waits for the right time to pounce and attempt to sway everyone else who is uncertain or out of the loop. They actually started out with a pro-AI stance. That in no way implies the majority was ever out of the loop or believed in any of the hype. The public are not a flock of baby birds waiting for their empty minds to be fed.
The majority doesn't even care about the principle of the matter. They are far more interested in whether it actually works reliably. The appeals to emotion, political bias, or ego are wildly out of touch and outdated. What you're observing today with young people is not that they have different "opinions", but that they are burned out on all opinions. We forced them to become so much more sophisticated and discerning by pressing that button too many times. You'd be just as cynical if you spent your childhood watching an iPad deliver endless ragebait.
I doubt any of the cited CEOs will care. “And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off (whoo-hoo-hoo)” - Taylor Swift.
Automation is such an old concept invented back in the 1st century AD. Furthermore, I don't see people hating the CEOs of Siemens, Honeywell, Schneider Electric, ABB, Yokogawa, Emerson, Allen Bradley, GE Fanuc, Kuka, Hyundia, Mitsubishi etc. They've been automating entire industries & manufacturing with their controllers (PLCs, DCS etc), SCADA, HMI & systems for decades. The first PLC was invented by General Motors back in 1968. China has entire dark factories making phones and their electric cars. The media is only crying now because their cushy office, journalism and art jobs are slowly going away.
I don't come down on anyone for failing to foresee how the web 2.0/social-media/streaming eras would evolve to be used against us more than for us. I'm as guilty as anyone. But in 2026 there's no excuse for failing to apply lessons from the last decade or two to extrapolate where AI is going.
It's hard to see why basically anyone would at this point.
I hope my prediction is wrong.
I've watched journalists dunk on this tech since the days of Tacotron. They love to dish out hate and venom and crystalize it around concepts that are easy to sell.
Not that the Dario and Sam haven't both been deliberately hyperbolic and made themselves easy targets, but the media was always attempting to do this.
Journalists hate AI and they always have.
We've seen them try dozens, if not hundreds of things to get the story to stick. Lately it's data centers being built and the stories of neighbors complaining about noise.
As much as I blame Sam for getting people angry at him, journalists also contributed to radicalizing people against him and turning him into an assassination target.
This headline is literally trying to reinforce this.
Wonder why people can't stand them.
More people alive today are educated in computer science than ever before. The same is true of epistemology, linguistics, and broader philosophy. Many have also lived long enough to see previous waves of AI come and go.
People were already watching the topic closely over a decade ago with DeepMind, AlphaGo, etc. None of the arguments against the current AI methods are new. People were poking holes in statistical methods centuries ago.
Mainstream media just waits for the right time to pounce and attempt to sway everyone else who is uncertain or out of the loop. They actually started out with a pro-AI stance. That in no way implies the majority was ever out of the loop or believed in any of the hype. The public are not a flock of baby birds waiting for their empty minds to be fed.
The majority doesn't even care about the principle of the matter. They are far more interested in whether it actually works reliably. The appeals to emotion, political bias, or ego are wildly out of touch and outdated. What you're observing today with young people is not that they have different "opinions", but that they are burned out on all opinions. We forced them to become so much more sophisticated and discerning by pressing that button too many times. You'd be just as cynical if you spent your childhood watching an iPad deliver endless ragebait.