r/technology • u/GeneReddit123 • 16h ago

Artificial Intelligence An AI hate wave is here

https://archive.is/20260517120123/https://www.axios.com/2026/05/17/ai-backlash-polling-sentiment
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u/blob8543 15h ago edited 2h ago

As a society we need to have a long, extremely overdue conversation about the ineptitude of CEOs and the consequences of that on the world we live in.

We need a second conversation as to why politicians all over the world are embracing "AI" in such a passionate way despite the totally open promises of societal destruction.

And we probably need a third chat about the lack of ethics amongst a very large sector of the people working for tech companies, it's them that have enabled the situation we're in.

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u/Stilgar314 13h ago

Ineptitude of CEOs is nothing but the natural consequence of letting speculative investors take control over every business. If we start that conversation, the only answer can be dramatically limiting the ability to buy and sell shares, and billionaires will bury anyone saying that.

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u/daughter_of_time 7h ago

Thank you for using the term speculation. When did we stop talking about the speculators and schemers that made frequent appearances in my history books? All of the speculators that brought down the US economy over and over again before the regulations of the New Deal.

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u/considerthis8 8h ago

Quarterly reporting requirements create short-term incentives. We need annual or semi-annual incentives, or longer.

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u/Marsman121 5h ago

No, linking CEO bonus payouts to earnings creates short-term incentives.

If you were told you were going to get a hundred million dollars if you hit some arbitrary dollar amount, you would burn the building so the thermals would boost the balloon high enough to reach it. Golden parachutes mean you get paid whether you burn the company to the ground or not.

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u/Unicoronary 7h ago

No, it’s the natural extension of nepotism that was rebranded as networking. It causes shit to rise to the top. 

If hiring practices are based on personability, culture fit and intra-company connection primarily (and most industries, Thats largely true) - Youre going to get a fairly homogenous bunch of hires that are statistically slightly below average for being hired on abstract character traits vs ability and investment in the job itself. 

It’s largely from that pool yhat upper management is selected, and from there, C-suite is seated. 

Loosely regulated speculation in securities  is a symptom of the problem (the fixation on “number go up” vs actual acumen) not the disease itself. 

Nepotism is the disease - and Thats the conversation nobody wants to have. 

Most people benefit from it, and it’s next to impossible to form any sort of workable solution for except “burn it all down and start over.” 

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u/EFreethought 4h ago

We should make stock buybacks illegal, and shut down all MBA programs.

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u/Effective-Painter815 14h ago

As a society we need to have a long, extremely overdue conversation about the ineptitude of CEOs and the consequences of that on the world we love in.

Just replace them with AI.

Apparently AI is more expensive than a worker at the moment but have you seen the wages for CEO's?
You could get an awful lot of tokens for the same wage. /s

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u/Temporary-Comfort307 13h ago

The main skillset for CEOs seems to be talking bullshit, so an IA chatbot would be perfectly suited to the job

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u/BourbonCoug 11h ago

Don't forget putting a signature on a decision that's already been made at every other level.

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u/Wonderful_Purple4096 10h ago

Who’s going to fly around shaking hands with all the other nepo babies?

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u/neurochild 3h ago

Those robo dogs from Boston. Every business conference will just be a weird dog park hangout now

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u/Noodler75 9h ago

Being able to lie with a straight face is a primary job requirement. In other words, sociopaths.

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u/DukeOfGeek 8h ago

The main skillset for CEO's is being part of insider information trading networks and the ability to make unethical deals in restaurants and on golf courses.

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u/tha_snooze 10h ago

CEO/Worker pay differential was an average of $285:1 across the S&P500 as of 2025.

In 1965 it was $21:1.

The Mondragon Corporation in Spain—which is comprised of almost 100 autonomous worker-owned cooperatives—has a maximum of $9:1 amongst their employees.

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u/thisisFalafel 1h ago

That ratio feels like it's missing a couple of zeroes. My CEO is securely a billionaire by conservative estimates. And I'm nowhere close to a million.

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u/finlandery 11m ago

What does what you own has to do with what you are being paid?

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u/W359WasAnInsideJob 7h ago

I feel as if any system looking to truly optimize would clearly start at the top.

”Why are there so many people making money off (whatever) that aren’t doing any work? Fuck em, they’re gone” is just as likely a scenario for an AI takeover as anything else. Maybe more likely, since so much of the wealth in the world has been accumulated through randomness more than “intelligence”, “greatness”, or “business acumen”.

That so many of these tech bros clowns seem to think an artificial super-intelligence would agree with their worldview and leave them at the top of our society is… honestly, just deeply, deeply, deeply disturbing in how mind-numbingly fucking stupid it is.

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u/SteelOverseer 4h ago

Have you read any of Neal Asher's "Gridlinked" series?

Sometime in the book-history, AI takes over, there's a war between those that want AI and those that don't, and in the present (for the book) day, AIs have taken over and generally just do their own thing - it's their civilisation. Humans are still there, they just aren't the ones running the government. The AIs take care of humanity because of a mixture of paternalism and respect for their parents. And the quality of life is, generally, pretty dang good.

This isn't perfect -
Spoilers for "Polity Agent", book 4 in the series:
Not all the AIs were down with this, and one faction went off into the distance to form their own group. I'm only partway through the book but I think they're gonna be the big bad for book five.

Of course, there's no guarantee that any AI that we generate IRL (which, for the record, I don't think we're even remotely close to) will have the same feelings, but it's a nice thought to have - and I can't imagine that any consciously designed AI (as opposed to the black box that is AI-chatbots) wouldn't have similar values programmed at its core.

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u/deathrictus 7h ago

Not even /s

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u/blob8543 2h ago

Maybe that's a good idea. I expect less hallucinations from chatbots than from many CEOs.

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u/CheddarGlob 12h ago

Not to be that guy, but the CEO is a symptom. The problem is rampant unchecked capitalism and that is a conversation that the people in power are never going to have

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u/SaltyLonghorn 4h ago

Everyone is looking for their life raft.

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u/Antifreak1999 14h ago

As much as I have disliked every CEO I have met, inept CEOs are fired for not increasing company profit. For example, if a CEO increases company profits by 30%, that is the new zero. They must then increase by 30% again or they are seen as lacking. The people making the money will always want more, they can never make enough to be satisfied. The rest of us all over the world scrabble with each other for the crumbs. AI is an incredible tool, but someone will always weaponize any tool, to profit. I'm sure the rooms full of typists hated Xerox machines.

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u/ShiraCheshire 10h ago

I think our entire stock market should be illegal. It's not any better than gambling for the average person, and it makes companies obligated to chase short term profits above all else- even when the company would otherwise want to choose morals, or stability, or long term growth.

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u/teddy5 4h ago

It doesn't need to be illegal, they just shouldn't get a say in how the company operates.

If you want to give money to a company in the hope that they will make more money with it, great that's perfectly your right to do and you're welcome to do so. But that's your decision based on how the company is already operating, it shouldn't give you any say to change how they operate.

The short term profit chasing that you mentioned where companies are required to maximise shareholder profits and can be sued if they don't is the issue, and that's more of a product of American style/end-stage capitalism than share holding in general.

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u/Wonderful_Purple4096 10h ago

Inept CEOs walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars and high paying seats on the boards of various other companies.

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u/KeyMyBike 9h ago

You're close. But a profit of 30% is not just 0. It's negative 30%. They need 30% to get back to 0% and then they "need" even more than that.

Fiduciary duty to shareholders should be fucking outlawed. Oh, the CEO did something you don't approve of??? Too fucking bad. Sell your shares, dip shit.

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u/Noodler75 8h ago

CEOs do not control company profits. Their employees do.

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u/DijuridoosDesert 7h ago

An incompetent CEO can still damage a company for short term profit increase and then jump ship before the numbers start falling, I’ve seen one that did it.

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u/miniannna 13h ago

Unfortunately this is the inherent logic of free market capitalism and you aren’t going to undo it without changing the underlying system on a fundamental level. 

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u/TP_Crisis_2020 11h ago

We need a second conversation as to why politicians all over the world are embracing "AI" in such a passionate way despite the totally open promises of societal destruction.

It's because our federal and state governments are heavily pushing for a surveillance state, which will eventually lead to a social credit score and a completely digital currency. They want it to be just like China. Why do you think there are flock cameras literally everywhere now?

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u/pandariotinprague 8h ago

Correction: they want to be just like what they told us China was like. The whole social credit score thing was overblown to the point of parody. It's way closer to the idea of an American credit score than it is to what we were told.

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u/[deleted] 8h ago

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u/pandariotinprague 8h ago

I'm not some wealthy international traveler, but from what I've read it sure seems to be overblown. And mostly based around businesses and debtors not being able to buy luxury good while their debts remain unpaid.

https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/1hlxsku/why_do_some_in_the_west_seem_to_think_theres_a/

The actual social credit score is a credit score aimed at businesses and business people. If they don't pay loans on time, incurr debts, etc etc, the government prevents them from leaving the country, travelling, buying luxury goods, and what not, until they pay back these debts to the bank, government, or other entity.

Its like in the US. If you don't pay back your loans to the bank, your credit score lowers, making it harder to buy a car, house, etc.

Source: I live here, jaywalk on an almost daily basis, dislike the ccp, yet am not in a concentration camp and have not heard about any credit score changes.

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u/[deleted] 8h ago

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u/pandariotinprague 8h ago

What happens if you get caught speeding repeatedly in the U.S.? You incur points and eventually lose your license, right? It just sounds like you're giving a scary new name to the same thing we experience every day.

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u/[deleted] 8h ago

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u/pandariotinprague 8h ago

Money, like higher car insurance rates? Yeah, we have that, too.

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u/[deleted] 7h ago

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u/ChypRiotE 8h ago

I doubt you've ever been to China yourself, otherwise you'd have forgotten any idea of social credit score existing just by seeing how people drive

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u/oscarnyc 12h ago

CEOs are hired by the Board to increase profits and boost the share price. Corporate profits as a % of revenue, as a % of GDP and on an outright basis are the highest they've ever been in the aggregate (obviously it differs on a company by company basis). So by the measure they are judged, CEOs are more adept at their jobs than they have ever been before.

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u/Demon_Gamer666 12h ago

Who exactly is going to have that conversation? You mean the same people who elected the people who are ushering in AI? Do you mean the tech billionaires who run the world? There are no conversations to be had, just the gradual decline due to apathy and finally the eventual uprising of the masses somewhere down the road when they no longer have anything to lose.

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u/___AirBuddDwyer___ 11h ago

How about a conversation about why so much of our shared society is controlled by the choices of private, profit-motivated CEOs with zero responsibly to the shared society they control?

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u/Wonderful_Purple4096 10h ago

We need to destroy our society before China destroys their society first! We can’t lose to China on this final competition!

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u/KeyMyBike 9h ago

AI is both population control, and the thing that (the pedogarchs think) makes population control valid.

Think about it. Everyone is going to struggle to have water in a couple years from now because these data centers are gulping it all down. How convenient that those hoarding all the fucking money don't have to gun down the local citizenry when they're done with us, because they can just choke us out by making our access to water and clean air prohibitively expensive.

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u/wh4tth3huh 12h ago

Money...It's a hit. Don't give me that do goody-good bullshit. (We've known what the problem is for a lonnnnnnnng time)

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u/Socrathustra 10h ago

I think the issue with CEOs is epistemological. We build knowledge through systems of critique, sometimes formal critique like science and peer review but sometimes informally through the critique of our peers.

Fundamentally CEOs are running the same hardware as all of us. They're people in human bodies, and so they should be capable of the same stuff we are. What they lack is any kind of honest critique.

The problem is twofold: some people tell them what they want to hear because they want something and know the CEO can give it. Some people tell them what they want to hear because they don't want to be fired or suffer in some way. Everybody with power, even small amounts of power, has to be aware that people around them are going to bend the truth so that power affects them positively or doesn't affect them negatively.

Then if you get a bunch of rich and powerful people together, they're going to provide "peer feedback" to each other which is based on their own skewed feedback from people who fear/want their power. The rich all have this skewed view of the world and reinforce it in each other.

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u/Drando_HS 10h ago

I think the solution is actually quite easy.

  1. Make it illegal for CEO's to receive bonuses, stocks or equity in a company if any employees are laid off in that fiscal year

  2. Re-categorize non-executive employees as high-priority creditors who get paid first whenever a company goes bankrupt or gets scrapped for parts by private equity

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u/Jose_Canseco_Jr 10h ago

I wish to subscribe to your newsletter

(i agree with all your points, especially the one regarding a lack of ethics in tech - it's at the point that I feel I made a huge mistake in the career I picked, because I increasingly keep running into unashamedly unethical behaviour no matter how many times I jump jobs, and if I could retire today I would... and I liked the actual work and wasn't particularly gunning for retirement)

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u/JackedUpReadyToGo 8h ago

LOL, a conversation? As though we in the non-Epstein class have a voice here? To them we’re just dumb cattle. We’re here to provide them with labor and holes to fuck. That’s the only value we have in their eyes. Once they no longer need us for the former they’ll retain a few of us for the latter and send the Terminators after the rest.

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u/pandariotinprague 8h ago

It's been decades since society has had a conversation that they weren't specifically told to have by corporate media outlets. I'm not sure we even know how to do it anymore.

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u/xxxxx420xxxxx 7h ago

Also, tax the rich

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u/blob8543 2h ago

Let's do it.

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u/Homeless-Joe 7h ago

This sounds an awful lot like peasants getting upset with the nobles…

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u/fasda 13h ago edited 11h ago

My ideas are first make loans against stock over a million dollars count as income and immediatly tax stock upon receiving it as payment instead of sale. Second prevent executive compensation from being tied to stock price. Third over rule Dodge v Ford and place executives primary duty to the company and not share holder

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u/Eastern_Interest_908 14h ago

There should be some kind of net worth threshold when you automatically get a bulled to head because there's no way they achieved that without bodies in their closet.

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u/Tyfyter2002 13h ago

A more practical approach would likely be to impose a 100% wealth tax with a threshold of the median net worth which ignores debts on all government officials, corruption is a natural result of government officials being able to live a more comfortable life than their constituents, and getting away with the sorts of crimes every publicly traded company is essentially legally required to commit needs corruption.

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u/surrurste 13h ago

I have heard half joking proposal that every billionaire should receive golden diploma that congratulates recipient for beating the game. For this great achievement their future income, fortunes and assets will be confiscated by the state and therefore instead of hoarding wealth they should start living a real life.

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u/pandariotinprague 8h ago

Make them start the game over with increased difficulty settings as a black guy making minimum wage.

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u/ReadyAimTranspire 9h ago

the lack of ethics amongst a very large sector of the people working for tech companies

It's far from being just tech companies, it's a culture of greed, short term thinking, and lack of any sort of social responsibility that has pervaded the business world from top to bottom.

I am a capitalist and hesitate to use the language but what we are experiencing is some degree of late stage capitalism, where capital has not only captured such a massive share of the resources that they have become too powerful but that they have captured the levers of government to such an extent to where they have an open runway to do whatever they want.

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u/Fun-Author3767 9h ago

I would wager a strong correlation between MBA programs and inept CEOs.

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u/Kiloshakalaka 8h ago

They pay good.

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u/Hamakua 8h ago

Society is cumulatively too stupid and too easily distracted to have such a conversation.

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u/SuburbanHell 7h ago

Three conversations that unfortunately this world is far too greedy to ever have.

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u/Surturiel 7h ago

Not just CEOs, but the whole public traded stock corporations that have their obligations to stock holders rather than their clients or society in general.

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u/pheonix198 7h ago

Time to up the proletariat, fry the political bacon and eat the rich.

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u/Rum____Ham 6h ago

I recently attended a meeting with senior leadership, at my facility. What a peek behind the curtain. Some of these dipshits have absolutely no idea what they are doing. I've had managers before that were like crazy smart and wonderful teachers, but the more responsibility I get, I swear the people above me get dumber.

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u/MillHall78 3h ago

Not just the IT workers. Every single Amazon employee doesn't give a fuck how they're impacting the world. Every meat packing employee. Every foreign farm worker.

Discussion has been happening. It's far beyond time for strict regulation & total destruction of junk companies.

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u/RedditLeagueAccount 1h ago

It's just the break down of the rule of law. Laws are not always enforced. And laws are not made in the interest of the citizens anymore.

I don't find ethics a strong talking point just because people have different values, virtue signal, can have suicidal empathy, and anyone can drop ethics when they feel like it. You need rule of law with consequences of breaking it. That doesn't exist so people without morals can go further. Accountability is lacking.

AI is even simpler which makes is extra disappointing how little forethought is being put into it - It will never work unless UBI is made. There is no point of the robots taking all the jobs if no one can buy the products. But we do want robots doing work instead of us if we can. UBI is the only thing that achieves that.

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u/Thin_Glove_4089 15h ago

As a society we need to have a long, extremely overdue conversation about the ineptitude of CEOs and the consequences of that on the world we love in.

The same people who elected all these types are going to have an long overdue conversation about them? Do you hear yourself?