Comment by Swizec

>Yes, but since you are out of business you no longer have an opportunity to fix that situation or adapt it to your morals. It's final.

Lots of room for nuance here, but generally Id say its more pragmatic to pivot your business to one that aligns with your morals and is still feasible, rather than convince yourself youre going to influence something you have no control over while compromising on your values. i am going to emphasize the relevance of something being an actual moral or ethical dilemma vs something being a very deep personal preference or matter of identity/personal branding.

>Fair point! It feels like a death sentence when you put so much into it though -- a part of you IS dying. It's a natural reflex to revolt at the thought.

I agree, it is a real loss and I don't mean for it to be treated lightly but if we are talking about morals and potentially feeling forced to compromise them in order to survive, we should acknowledge it's not really a survival situation.

>Depends if you are doing it 'for their own good' or not.

what do you mean by this?

I am not posing a hypothetical. modern medicine has plenty of contributions to it from unethical sources. Should that information be stripped from medical textbooks and threaten to take licenses away from doctors who use it to inform their decision until we find an ethical way to relearn it? Knowing this would likely allow for large amounts of suffering to go untreated that could have otherwise been treated? I am sincerely trying not to make this sound like a loaded question

also, this is not saying the means are justified. I want to reiterate my point of explicitly not justifying the means and saying the actors involved in the means should be held maximally accountable.

I would think from your stance on the first bullet point you would agree here - as by removing the product from the process you are able to adapt it to your morals.

>Finally - Who determines what is ethical?

I agree that philosophically speaking all ethics are relative, and I was intending to make my point from the perspective of navigating the issues as in individual not as a collective making rules to enforce on others. So you. you determine what is ethical to you

However, there are a lot of systems already in place for determining what is deemed ethical behavior in areas where most everyone agrees some level of ethics is required. This is usually done through consensus and committees with people who are experts in ethics and experts in the relevant field its being applied to.

AI is new and this oversight does not exist yet, and it is imperative that we all participate in the conversation because we are all setting the tone for how this stuff will be handled. Every org may do it differently, and then whatever happens to be common practice will be written down as the guidelines

>It's final.

You should tell that to all the failed businesses Jobs had or was ousted out of. Hell, Trump hasn't really had a single successful business in his life.

Nothing is final until you draw your last breath.

>Who determines what is ethical? beyond the 'golden rule'?

To be frank, you're probably not the audience being appealed to in this post if you have to suggest "ethics can be relative". This is clearly a group of craftsmen offering their hands and knowledge. There are entire organizations who have guidelines if you need some legalese sense of what "ethical" is here.

Not the parent.

I believe that they are bringing up a moral argument. Which I'm sympathetic too, having quit a job before because I found that my personal morals didn't align with the company, and the cognitive dissonance to continue working there was weighing heavily on me. The money wasn't worth the mental fight every day.

So, yes, in some cases it is better to be "right" and be forced out of business than "wrong" and remain in business. But you have to look beyond just revenue numbers. And different people will have different ideas of "right" and "wrong", obviously.

yes [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No

Most of the software written worldwide is created for internal company usage. Consumers don't even know that it exists.

I've worked (still do!) for engineering services companies. Other businesses pay us to build systems for them to either use in-house or resell downstream. I have to assume that if they're paying for it, they see profit potential.

> If AI can make things 1000x more efficient,

Is that the promise of the faustian bargain we're signing?

Once the ink is dry, should I expect to be living in a 900,000 sq ft apartment, or be spending $20/year on healthcare? Or be working only an hour a week?

>They are simply suggesting that the moral qualms of using AI are simply not that high - neither to vast majority of consumers, neither to the government.

And I believe they (and I) are suggesting that this is just a bad faith spin on the market, if you look at actual AI confidence and sentiment and don't ignore it as "ehh just the internet whining". Consumers having less money to spend doesn't mean they are adopting AI en masse, nor are happy about it.

I don't think using the 2025 US government for a moral compass is helping your case either.

>If AI can make things 1000x more efficient

Exhibit A. My observations suggest that consumers are beyond tired of talking about the "what ifs" while they struggle to afford rent or get a job in this economy, right now. All the current gains are for corporate billionaires, why would they think that suddenly changes here and now?

The Amish don’t ban all tech that can threaten community. They will typically have a phone or computer in a public communications house. It’s being a slave to the tech that they oppose (such as carrying that tech with you all the time because you “need” it).

You are thinking too small.

The goal of AI is NOT to be a tool. It's to replace human labor completely.

This means 100% of economic value goes to capital, instead of labor. Which means anyone that doesn't have sufficient capital to live off the returns just starves to death.

To avoid that outcome requires a complete rethinking of our economic system. And I don't think our institutions are remotely prepared for that, assuming the people runnign them care at all.

I was told that Amish (elders) ban technology that separates you from God. Maybe we should consider that? (depending on your personal take on what God is)

>Where are you going to draw the line?

How about we start with "commercial LLMs cannot give Legal, Medical, or Financial advice" and go from there? LLMs for those businesses need to be handled by those who can be held accountable (be it the expert or the CEO of that expert).

I'd go so far to try and prevent the obvious and say "LLM's cannot be used to advertise product". but baby steps.

>AI as a technology is almost impossible to stop.

Not really a fan of defeatism speak. Tech isn't as powerful as billionaire want you to pretend it is. It can indeed be regulated, we just need to first use our civic channels instead of fighting amongst ourselves.

Of course, if you are profiting off of AI, I get it. Gotta defend your paycheck.

> AI is just a tool, like most other technologies, it can be used for good and bad.

The same could be said of social media for which I think the aggregate bad has been far greater than the aggregate good (though there has certainly been some good sprinkled in there).

I think the same is likely to be true of "AI" in terms of the negative impact it will have on the humanistic side of people and society over the next decade or so.

However like social media before it I don't know how useful it will be to try to avoid it. We'll all be drastically impacted by it through network effects whether we individually choose to participate or not and practically speaking those of us who still need to participate in society and commerce are going to have to deal with it, though that doesn't mean we have to be happy about it.

If it is just a tool, it isn't AI. ML algorithms are tools that are ultimately as good or bad as the person using them and how they are used.

AI wouldn't fall into that bucket, it wouldn't be driven entirely by the human at the wheel.

I'm not sold yet whether LLMs are AI, my gut says no and I haven't been convinced yet. We can't lose the distinction between ML and AI though, its extremely important when it comes to risk considerations.

Oxycontin certainly worked, and the markets demanded more and more of it. Who are we to take a moral stand and limit everyone's access to opiates? We should just focus on making a profit since we're filling a "need"

This seems rather black and white. Defining the morals probably makes sense, then evaluating whether they can be lived or whether we can compromise in the face other priorities?

The age old question: do people get what they want, or do they want what they (can) get?

Put differently, is "the market" shaped by the desires of consumers, or by the machinations of producers?

> when the market is telling you loud and clear they want X

Does it tho? Articles like [1] or [2] seem to be at odd with this interpretation. If it were any different we wouldn't be talking about the "AI bubble" after all.

[1]https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-exec-asks-why-arent-mor...

[2]https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat...

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Some people maintain that JavaScript is evil too, and make a big deal out of telling everyone they avoid it on moral grounds as often as they can work it into the conversation, as if they were vegans who wanted everyone to know that and respect them for it.

So is it rational for a web design company to take a moral stance that they won't use JavaScript?

Is there a market for that, with enough clients who want their JavaScript-free work?

Are there really enough companies that morally hate JavaScript enough to hire them, at the expense of their web site's usability and functionality, and their own users who aren't as laser focused on performatively not using JavaScript and letting everyone know about it as they are?

Only in exactly the same sense that portrait painters were robbed of their income by the invention of photography. In the end people adapted and some people still paint. Just not a whole lot of portraits. Because people now take selfies.

Authors still get recognition. If they are decent authors producing original, literary work. But the type of author that fills page five of your local news paper, has not been valued for decades. But that was filler content long before AI showed up. Same for the people that do the subtitles on soap operas. The people that create the commercials that show at 4am on your TV. All fair game for AI.

It's not a heist, just progress. People having to adapt and struggling with that happens with most changes. That doesn't mean the change is bad. Projecting your rage, moralism, etc. onto agents of change is also a constant. People don't like change. The reason we still talk about Luddites is that they overreacted a bit.

People might feel that time is treating them unfairly. But the reality is that sometimes things just change and then some people adapt and others don't. If your party trick is stuff AIs do well (e.g. translating text, coming up with generic copy text, adding some illustrations to articles, etc.), then yes AI is robbing you of your job and there will be a lot less demand for doing these things manually. And maybe you were really good at it even. That really sucks. But it happened. That cat isn't going back in the bag. So, deal with it. There are plenty of other things people can still do.

You are no different than that portrait painter in the 1800s that suddenly saw their market for portraits evaporate because they were being replaced by a few seconds exposure in front of a camera. A lot of very decent art work was created after that. It did not kill art. But it did change what some artists did for a living. In the same way, the gramophone did not kill music. The TV did not kill theater. Etc.

Getting robbed implies a sense of entitlement to something. Did you own what you lost to begin with?

The answer is "the highest-ranked free one in a Google Search".

When a single such "actually good" AI-generated course actually exists, this question might be worth engaging with.

> if you combine the Stone Soup strategy with Clever Hans syndrome you can sell the illusion of not working for 8 billable hours a day

No thanks, I'm good.

> one of the most fastest growing user acquisition user base in history

By selling a dollar of compute for 90 cents.

We've been here before, it doesn't end like you think it does.

That's where the post-scarcity society AI will enable comes in! Surely the profits from this technology will allow these displaced programmers to still live comfortable lives, not just be hoarded by a tiny number of already rich and powerful people. /s

> If you are a very good developer, you will always be in demand.

"Always", in the same way that five years ago we'd "never" have an AI that can do a code review.

Don't get me wrong: I've watched a decade of promises that "self driving cars are coming real soon now honest", latest news about Tesla's is that it can't cope with leaves; I certainly *hope* that a decade from now will still be having much the same conversation about AI taking senior programmer jobs, but "always" is a long time.

After the year 2000. dot com burst.

An tech employee posted he looked for job for 6 months, found none and has joined a fast food shop flipping burgers.

That turned tech workers switching to "flipping burgers" into a meme.

.com implosion, tech jobs of all kinds went from "we'll hire anyone who knows how to use a mouse" to the tech jobs section of the classifieds was omitted entirely for 20 months. There have been other bumps in the road since then but that was a real eye-opener.

The defense industry in southern California used to be huge until the 1980s. Lots and lots of ex-defense industry people moved to other industries. Oil and gas has gone through huge economic cycles of massive investment and massive cut-backs.

It's not a pejorative statement, I used to live in Stack Overflow.

But the killer feature of an LLM is that it can synthesize something based on my exact ask, and does a great job of creating a PoC to prove something, and it's cheap from time investment point of view.

And it doesn't downvote something as off-topic, or try to use my question as a teaching exercise and tell me I'm doing it wrong, even if I am ;)

I think that's OP's point though, Ai can do it better now. No searching, no looking. Just drop your question into Ai with your exact data or function and 10 seconds later you have a working solution. Stackoverflow is great but Ai is just better for most people.

Instead of running a google query or searching in Stackoverflow you just need a chatGPT, Claude or your Ai of choice open in a browser. Copy and paste.

It became as annoying as experts exchange the very thing it railed against!

Sure, but it seems here that they are rejecting everything related to AI, which is probably not a smart business move, as they also remark, since this year was much harder for them.

The fact is, a lot of new business is getting done in this field, with or without them. If they want to take the "high road", so be it, but they should be prepared to accepts the consequences of worse revenues.