Tech specialists ignoring human feelings about AI and the future of tech, while also looking at the amount of downright evil tech out there makes reconsider about wanting to continue to work in this profession over and over again.

Before I knew how to program I used to think software developers were smart wizards capable of creating cool stuff out of thin air but the recent years proved me differently given how many of them outright water out of their mouths at the mere thought of replacing the human in the loop with some bullshit parrot we call AI.

Especially on this website I rarely find people having human first thoughts and it makes me despise software engineers.

What are the examples of evil tech?

Autonomous flying drones, mass surveillance, AI trained to deny health insurance claims

The trouble with some of these techs is that its good or bad depending on use. Flying drones are great for disaster aid, delivery of items in difficult regions, mapping your farm, etc. Mass surveillance, yes, thats unpleasant, but its a bit hard to see how for instance we can't also have advances in camera technology and not incentivize it happening anyway due to people just installing cameras of their own accord. AI trained to deny insurance claims, well, I'd put that on using AI as an excuse to launder the insurer's own wishes.

And sometimes, the valid outcome is to deny a claim. It's not like fraud magically disappears in the world of health insurance.

All the things that help societies function in a stable way. So please also add All Cops Are Bad and prisons are bad and so on.

Pretty much anything Microsoft does, for example.

The OS is neutral (I don't like forced ads and things like that, but that's just how they probably deem they can be profitable today. You can place that as a negative yes), the browser is neutral, well it was at least nice to have some competition before they caved to Chrome. The gaming systems are well liked generally. C# is well liked.

If you mean things like being overly agreeable to government requests or aiding Israel in Palestine, then I can agree.

Big tech has provided me immense improvements in life. Governments are great at fumbling things at best, experts at killing millions at worst. How is tech worse than governments or other businesses? I am every day grateful to Google, Amazon, OpenAI etc for the wonderful services they provide for so cheap or free. The people who whine are precisely the problem people. Many shopkeepers used to be lazy, rude and think themselves kings. After amazon and home food delivery services, they have gotten whipped into shape. Many items were simply not available at all in one's city, and I can now easily have them at my doorstep.

Fishermen rejoice, for the price of bait will come down rapidly in the face of such a dramatic oversupply.

I am giving you honest feedback exactly how I feel my life improved from big tech. If you want to ignore me, then you are free to. "Big tech is evil/harmful" then can be made only if you agree to ignore and discriminate against people who are honestly believing otherwise. Thats okay if you want to feel so, nobody is stopping you. I am being completely honest in how I absolutely hated it before Amazon and how shops have improved in their behavior.

If this is your genuine belief then try this exercise: put yourself in the shoes of the shopkeeper who owned his own means of production directly and sold his wares to his immediate community before Big Tech. Would you rather have his job, or would you prefer to be working in an Amazon warehouse where you're obliged to relieve yourself in a bottle for want of toilets while being surveilled in a manner a Soviet political officer might consider excessive?

I am glad it has, and I think that recognizing the affordable access to welfare, goods, and food has been a valuable gain.

Call me a problem person, but I would say the tech companies you are referring too are perpetrating significant harm, but maybe you do not directly experience this. As an exercise I can use terms that we normally restrict to governments.

Google controls arguably the worlds most advancement propaganda system^1 ever created, has monopolistic control over information access worldwide^2, has farreaching influence on academic research^3456 and can perform censorship on major communication and education sites without overshight or juridicial control^7. They are a dictatorship with liberal capitalism as their ideology.

A world controlled by these businesses may have been beneficial for you so far, but they systematically disempower us. By yielding power and influence to them, we lose the ability to decide how we wish live and how we shape the systems around us.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... [3] https://focs.computer.org/2025/ [4] https://neurips.cc/sponsors/sponsors-list?year=2026 [5] https://www.usenix.org/supporters [6] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c..., 02 Oct 2025 Full accounts report Google providing £1.325 billion for Deepmind activities [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#Advertise...

People often complain about the humanities requirements for CS degrees, and now the world is run by tech executives who don’t have a clue.

and now the world is run by tech executives who don’t have a clue.

They do have a clue, what's missing is any sort of belief in the value of ethics.

Ethics are irrelevant. They lack a believe in God and without God nothing but evil and chaos may exist.

Prove god first. If you succeeded, prove your specific god and why your special book is correct.

Surely if you're a Christian then you also think evil and chaos couldn't exist without a god? Seems odd to single out everything else.

Do we have any examples of societies or governments ran by humanities people? I at least don't know any country ran by tech execs. If we can find examples of both, then we can compare and see.

The UK government ministers have a lot of Oxford PPE graduates – the first P is Philosophy,

The current PM has an English degree.

The last one to have a scientific background was Thatcher.

That's just the Prime Minister. One person being from tech background doesn't make it a system ran by techs if the rest are of some other viewpoint or profession. So we would need examples of both governments ran by a group of humanities people having the "real power" and compare it to a government ran by a group of technical/engineering people.

You said the current UK government is mostly Philosophy background people. So how would you rate its performance?

Law is a branch of humanities, so most governments are ran by humanities people

Tech exec's don't always veer STEM, eg. Musk is a Business Grad who took "Physics for Business Grad" bridging courses, Paul Graham is a Philosophy grad.

China is said to be top heavy in actual STEM graduates at the party committee five year plan level.

A number of countries are top heavy in politico's with a formal Law degree, eg. Australia.

I’ve been thinking lately how lots of tech people dunk on humanities and liberal arts, only to come to forums like this and discuss ethics, reality, and the nature of consciousness (at quite a shallow level)

“Engineer’s disease” and all that.

I don't have much against the humanities, but my social science sequence in college only taught me how bad psychology was as a field (being taught in biology how to read and weigh journal articles while simultaneously being assigned psych articles with tiny samples and dubious methodology...was amusing, to say the least).

Psych is supposed to be a science, not a humanity, and psych and social science are not remotely the same thing.

Alternative hypothesis: these people have a better framework to discuss "ethics, reality and the nature of consciousness" than people who do humanities have.

That explains the Hawking example in this thread, too.

Proposed causal explanation from me: STEM interest and education gives you skill and tools for principled, consistent reasoning, expressing nontrivial concepts (that's what mathematics is largely about), as well as appreciation and deeper understanding for how things in our actual, physical universe work, from biology and physics to computation. Conversely, humanist base with no STEM experience collapses to rhetoric, completely detached from actual reality.

You said it much better than me. Without a grounding in physical sciences, philsophies about topics like consciousness just end up in pointless circles or even absurdities. The atomism theory itself was a circular endless philosophical debate until we got sharper tools and better data for example. So a lot of problems that feel "metaphysical" today may soon fall to the grinding tank of natural science, as they always did over the past several centuries. Another thing is, people who don't know thermodynamics will be prone to thinking things like aphysical items can cause thoughts, without explaining how you are able to reconcile it with energy conservation since information requires energy. Not knowing turing computability makes people posit things like claiming quantum something and thus not a computer.

Another thing is, people who don't know thermodynamics will be prone to thinking things like aphysical items can cause thoughts, without explaining how you are able to reconcile it with energy conservation since information requires energy.

Yes. This is one of the main key insights that hasn't percolated to the humanities just yet. It's even not fully appreciated in STEM. Computer science is not a pure branch of mathematics anymore, because computation is an actual thermodynamical phenomenon, with identified and measured energy requirements. CS is part of physics now, and not in a trivial sense of "computers are physical devices", but a fundamental one - "computation itself is a physical process".

The atomism theory itself was a circular endless philosophical debate until we got sharper tools and better data for example.

(EDIT: matched GP's typo fix in quote)

Exactly, and same is true about everything from medicine or sociology - better tools allowed us to see answers to questions that previously were just discussed in abstract by philosophers.

I'm convinced cognitive sciences and sociology are about to see this happening to them, thanks to LLMs. It doesn't matter whether an LLM "truly thinks" or is just a facsimile - it's similar enough behaviorally to be interesting, and unlike a human mind, LLM "intelligence" is a computational artifacts in the engineering sense, reified as a big bag of floats configuring a structurally simple circuit. We can study that directly - slice nad and dice and prod, and what's more, we can study how they're forming - how the training turns the values from completely random to something that makes the circuit understand natural language and perform feats of general-purpose intelligence.

I bet it's gonna solve a lot of philosophical questions too, by allowing us to observe how the thing works in practice.

(Though it might still take decades for those observations to sink in; I mean LLMs are already direct empirical evidence disproving various ideas of Chomsky and Searle, yet I still see people talking about symbolic semantics and Chinese room in earnest every other day on HN...)

It's rhetoric grounded in common human experience, which actually defines our experience of reality.

You're making the usual mistake of assuming math and science are objective. They really aren't.

They're consistent experiences, which is not the same thing as being independent of our senses and reasoning ability - neither of which are infinite.

This is not the same as saying that science is a social process, although of course it is that too. There are very non-objective political and social processes deciding what gets researched, and how, with how much money, for what ends.

It's more fundamental - we're seeing the world through hard filters while telling ourselves those filters define the universe.

And we're not even great at it. We have economic beliefs that are predictably and catastrophically self-harming and also hold back fundamental research and progressive engineering.

So no - STEM does not have a solid basis for discussing ethics, reality or the nature of consciousness. If it did we'd be inventing more credible and exciting futures than the current likely-suicide run.

There's an argument for improving communication and collaboration between empirical sciences and humanities. But it's false to claim that serious philosophers cannot or do not have sufficient grounding in mathematics and physics. Two immediate examples that spring to mind are Tim Maudlin and Jeremy Butterfield.

actual reality

Actual reality, as defined through a lens of science and math (see the sibling comment about filters).

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a hard scientist (PhD in computational chemistry). Science is useful, necessary, and leads to amazing things. And there should be more dialog between hard scientists and philosophers, ethicists, etc.

But science has blind spots, and is itself built on unproven beliefs (for example, that "true reality", whatever the definition, can even be modeled with math). Scientists should remember that.

is itself built on unproven beliefs (for example, that "true reality", whatever the definition, can even be modeled with math). Scientists should remember that.

Yes, but they should also understand why, and that it's not a license to believe in anything.

The answer is: because 1) it worked so far, and 2) if it fundamentally doesn't, then we may just as well pack up our technological civilization and go back to caves we came from, because nothing makes sense and could ever make sense.

It's not like there is any alternative. If we can't talk about such "true reality", then not only science and mathematics doesn't make sense - humanities and philosophy don't make sense either, equally, and for the same reason!

As an example, the naming of Turing computers is really unfortunate. People who don't know what it is vastly underestimate its modeling power. As of yet all physical laws we know are turing computable, so for instance if you want to go "outside" you have to show hypercomputation.

If Turing computers are so powerful, then what do say about ethics and morality? Have the various ethical dilemmas been completely solved by computation now?

This is kind of the point of the thread - being mathematically and scientifically knowledgeable and rigorous can lead to different perceptions and definitions of "reality" (and maybe "truth"). But right now, we need ethics more than ever, and that's largely outside the realm of science.

The reality of a scientist is that everything is made of atoms, which are made of electrons & protons (even that's oversimplifying), there are various biological pathways to do whatever, planets orbit the sun, blah blah.

The reality of the person on the street is that they are hungry and would like a warm place to sleep, out of the rain.

I don't think a humanities class is gonna change that.

i totally agree with this, but i think at this point there's no going back, this AI wave isn't stopping anytime soon and it will continue growing.

I have better hopes about China at least. I hope the Chinese people haven't fallen to hysterical psychoses about "AI doom".

Surely the threat of being left behind by China fuels US AI investment, and vice versa, like a space race except nobody knows where the moon is.

I can't say without studying, but I feel Chinese people might be more sane about AI and not suffer from this psychotic "fear" of AI that causes them to lose all grip and regress back to things like dualism, false arguments, etc. They tend to be less religious or at least spiritually different from the West too, that might help.

You're insane if you think AI isn't an existential threat and unworthy of fear. A computer that is rapidly becoming better at humans at every task set in front of it. There can't possibly be a good outcome out of that.

I like the approach that the writer takes, emphasizing the importance of humanistic experience into technology. Language will be the deciding factor for what technology becomes, and on this point I have some critique of the language that the author uses.

Become the most flexible, underscore-shaped mind you can cultivate, the best-prepared proto-diplomat and translator of cultures, the family philosopher (because you no longer need someone to fix your printer).

In previous sentences, but here explicitely, the language used reflects that of the AI labs themselves. We do not need to find a metric to reduce our human experience to. We will not address systematic issues by pushing ourselves to become perfect. We need to start talking to our friends and families and question why we use the words we use in technology.

Hmm I'm a little lost on the specifics here, if you have time to clarify. I'm guessing the gist of your critique is that we should spurn Turing and insist on never using "think", "perceive", "calculate" (compute is fine IMHO), "understand", and other anthropomorphic words for non-biological systems (we use them plenty for fauna after all, and sometimes even for flora & fungi).

But that guess is thrown for a loop by the sentence you picked, which seems to exclusively concern the reader -- i.e. a human, hopefully! Is it the "proto-diplomat" and "translator" usage, which could conceivably include being a diplomat or translator for machines? Re-reading that doesn't seem like what she's getting at, but I really am not sure.

When I was young, I used to think that humanists are just unproductive people wasting time on unfalsifiable bullshit. I still think that.

You needed the philosophy of science to give you that term "unfalsifiable".

Let me introduce you to medical ethics... Unlike in engineering, ethics is a mandatory subject for medical students. And while there's a long-winded explanation for why it is that way, the short and an immediate explanation is that if you don't understand ethics, you, and the hospital that employed you, and the insurance company that pays for you will be sued out of profession. Because people's health and ultimately lives are at stake, and people become very touchy when someone dies or loses a limb unnecessarily.

I don't know what the situation is with other (mechanical, electrical etc.) engineering students, but I'm very much certain that the legal fiction that software comes with no warranty whatsoever is going to expire. Perhaps sometime soon. And then users of the said software will be allowed to sue, and, what do you know, ethics will suddenly be factored into CS curriculum ;)

I've been arguing for strict liability for defects in closed source since forever. I really hope you're right.

What CS curriculum? Why would people still be writing code in the future?

See for example 'philosophers' of consciousness who can't do thermodynamics, turing computability and information theory. One would expect these three fields are the basic and inexhaustive baseline requirements to put any theory on consciousness.

Name names?

Søren Kierkegaard predates the things you're mentioned, while neither (say) David Chalmers nor Michael Polanyi would have any trouble with them.

I won't blame Kieerkegaard for using the only knowledge available to him at that time. Let us take David Chalmers as an example. His degree is not in Physics or Computer Science and a quick google doesn't show me if he has any capability in thermodynamics. He could still have learned the subject and be capable of solving thermodynamics problems and placing thermodynamic arguments. If you are familiar with Chalmers, can you confirm or deny that?

Michael Polanyi seems a bonafide physicist, I'd be fine with his works on consciousness.

David Chalmers is Australian university educated, like myself, Dominic Hyde (metaphysics), Jerome Gauntlett (quantum field theory), and others all of the same generation - we all had the same undergraduate exposure to physics, pure applied mathematics, and can handle thermodynamics, information theory, Turing computability, and related undergraduate topics.

Chalmers specialised in pure mathematics, was broad enough to get a Rhodes Scholarship and jumped ship for being a global leader(?)(according to some) in philosophy of the mind.

Perhaps you're thinking of Dennett who was more of a biology nerd, although I see no reason to think he is incapable of grasping thermodynamics, information theory, and Turing computability given his broad autodidact tendencies.

Biology nerd works too, broadly any natural sciences will do as a baseline to start with. All of these backgrounds sound excellent, yes.

It might be an issue with how you think of Philosophers then, you've just essentially given a seal of approval to Dennett and Chalmers who are regarded by some as the leading names in philosophy of the mind.

( Also, say, Stan Dahaene, David Rosenthal, Jesse Prinz, Guilio Tononi, and others also I guess )

Stuff like information theory and computability are part and parcel of educating about thinking, math, and physics for late 20th century universities.

I think my current view is something like: Humanities are real and interesting, but much academic "humanities" work is highfalutin BS. People feel tech has a problem, and there's an excess of people with humanities credentials who want to feel valued. That doesn't mean people with humanities credentials are the solution to tech's problem. Those grads might be able to lecture you about how everything is terrifically problematic, but they won't necessarily be able to offer significant insight beyond that.

There probably is a lot of room for genuinely valuable tech-adjacent humanities work -- something like the Community Notes algorithm on X could be a good example. But I have little faith in humanities grads to do it, in part because they don't understand tech at a systems level and don't want to learn.

These are just my vague impressions -- take with a grain of salt.

It's idealistic but I love it. I've been thinking a lot about this.

At my alma mater they forced all of us to take a couple of humanities courses. They were actually the highlight of my senior year. I do believe it's something that's quite lacking in an number/outcome-based education that should actually strive to produce well rounded individuals that will-not-do-evil.

https://catalog.caltech.edu/current/information-for-undergra...

Alas, I went on to write code for a living anyway.

I’m not sure tech needs much of anything except less Venture Capitalists throwing money at whatever bullshit SV produces and more FOSS to actually keep the system going for the betterment of mankind. However, you as a human being need humanism more than ever. I think the biggest threat to humanity created by AI (and before transformers were introduced, platform application like Meta and X) is the fact that we ourselves become more machine like, callous, self-centred and, simply cruel. The algorithm should brute its force through obstacles trying to find the thing you desire, not you yourself.

Poetry, literature, arts and philosophy are good for the soul. That is why Umanistas in Renaissance Italy sought the philosophy and arts challenging the medieval doctrines after the Greek texts - Plato especially- were reintroduced to Europe. They ground you in history and the common themes we people experience regardless of our vast differences. And it doesn’t need to be classics, modern cinema, theatre, literature has lot to offer to anyone who cares to seek them, but there is no algorithm or streaming app. You really need to get off your ass, go to the gallery, museum, cinema or library and seek them out.

It was the rediscovery of Aristotle, not Plato, that made the big impact on the Western European Renaissance.

I'm sorry, but to me this just reads like someone who is high on their own supply? Seems like a lot of words to say that people should diversify into skills that AI is bad at...for now.

The alternatives are:

1. Stop AI. Not Pause, Stop.

2. Say goodbye to the concept of contributing labor to society, in the hope that the transition occurs quickly enough to not include 5-10y of working manual labor to survive.

Well yes, I chose the elimination of human labor.

The irony is that as code generation gets commoditized by LLMs, the "humanist" skills are becoming the only real engineering leverage left. Actually writing boilerplate or stitching APIs together is rapidly approaching near-zero marginal cost. What remains scarce is the ability to write a precise specification, think critically about edge cases, understand user empathy, and communicate complex trade offs without buzzwords.

We might finally be heading toward a point where philosophy, logic, and writing skills are more valuable for building software than pure syntax memory

It's not the lack of humanities that got us here, it's the search to increase capital

Things only will get worst to a point where they will be unusable, the "new" and cool thing will get corrupted in faster and faster circles, slop will take over everything and eventually kill "tech"

Steve Jobs may have been the world's greatest asshole, but was also one of the most humanist and philosophical tech leaders. Computers as a bicycle for the mind is still the metaphor I return to for what the point of all this is.

No idea what Steve would be saying about AI, but it would be nice to have anyone leading FAANG who clearly still has a soul and some degree of regard for for humanity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjIhmzU0Y8Y

I've seen about 100x more content like "tech needs humanities" than I've seen like "here's a brilliant humanities insight which can be applied to tech". Seems suspicious.

If you think an education can be reduced to simply-stated aphorisms you can follow, you're missing the point. If that's all there was, you wouldn't need to spend years in school.

It's like thinking you can become a tennis player by watching a single instructional video. There's no substitute for doing the work. The result is the skilled person.

It's interesting that you seemingly want to erase the humans from the humanities in order to distill the "insights".

I thought the humanities were supposed to train you to better express and share ideas? Seems like a major failure if they can't communicate to those outside their field.

I thought the humanities were supposed to train you to better express and share ideas?

Of course. But that applies to ideas broadly, whatever you happen to be working on.

Whereas the OP apparently wants something like a top 10 list of brilliant humanities insights, which is a misunderstanding of what students are learning: skills, not atomistic facts.

Even in the sciences, students are learning skills, not just facts and equations. The key is the ability to use them, and that takes a lot of practice. The result is a skilled scientist, not a container of facts.

Whereas the OP apparently wants something like a top 10 list of brilliant humanities insights

> "here's a brilliant humanities insight which can be applied to tech"

You are making a strawman of what OP said.

You are making a strawman of what OP said.

I don't think so. Is the OP not asking for some kind of simple universal aphorism? On the contrary, I think that the OP is making a straw man out of the humanities.

The usefulness to tech of those trained in the humanities is not to apply a few "brilliant" insights but rather to apply their "ordinary" but trained insights every day to ordinary tasks. In a meeting, you might say, "That's a good idea, Chris", but it would be so specific to the task that you couldn't state it as a "brilliant humanities insight". What you want is someone who "thinks different", as the saying goes.

How you get "simple universal aphorism" from "here's a brilliant humanities insight which can be applied to tech" I don't know.

Hell, I can come up with one myself:

"The medium is the message." - Marshall McLuhan

On second thought, perhaps it's both after all :P

Moreover, I've never seen the reverse. No one gets clicks by talking about the benefits that humanities majors. plus reap if they cared to understand technology.

If it's good for the goose, it's good for the gander. But the reality is that credit hours are expensive, and everything unrelated to your concentration is just a pile of extra debt you can never discharge.

Is humanities helpful for technology majors? Sure, I'd buy it. Is it worth the money? Probably not. Personally, I think CS majors should study law, if anything. But you can't do that at an introductory level (e.g. there is no Contract Law 101 for general education curricula), which is a real shame.

You can distill it down to: don't be a piece of shit, think carefully about how what you're building is used, talk to real humans and listen to them, and stop driving your product development process mimetically. Instead, solve real problems that real people have (not people in SF; I'm talking deep reality like a 60 y/o woman who had to get a job at a bible belt grocery store just to make ends meet but really wants to help you find the powdered peanut butter for your recipe but can't use the app the store gave her to find things).

This doesn't happen because there's a "lack of humanities in tech." It's because there's a lack of care and concern for others in tech. Most are motivated by the usual stuff: status and wealth. No amount of prescription in the form of humanities can fix that or will. You don't learn how to take care of real people by burying yourself in study. And you can't negotiate with sociopaths [1].

You just have to actually be a decent person. You can't game it. Thats part of tech's problem: it's always trying to solve problems from angles that the majority of people can't see, don't share, or can't even afford access to.

[1] https://youtu.be/nVp0Dvh1XQM?is=Tn76Ed3AlIv4nqjt (first part in the car)

Another thing to remember is that the "common people" example you gave aren't much better. Bible belt would be a good example, statistically a lot of them for instance hate gays. People are fucking assholes, people with more money just have more means to execute it.

Herein lies the problem: assuming that all people in a location/area are like that. Black and white thinking is the antithesis to a humanistic approach. Even worse is thinking your perspective is the "best" one and that whatever decisions you make are, of course, best for everyone.

We'd do a lot better if we accepted that everybody is different and homogeneity and the drive to force it on others is a disease of the mind. Yeah, there are plenty of assholes, but consider why: because someone taught that person as they were growing up (either directly or indirectly) that being an asshole protects you. I'm frequently an asshole because I got picked on when I was younger. But guess what? For the right situations, it works. For others a more gentle touch is fitting. That's the dynamic to encode into tech: leveraging a combination of deterministic and non-deterministic systems to create adaptable systems that relish in a mess as opposed to fall apart because they're too rigidly shaped to accommodate the most and only favor the perspective of the few. That's how you get inhumane systems: they're designed and maintained by people living completely different lives from the people they're building for.