I Fed the People Building the Metaverse

This is what I mean when I say I do not trust the people building AI.

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Who did we think was building it?

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I made cheesecake for the metaverse while men discussed artificial intelligence across a counter from me like they were debating fantasy football statistics. I watched mediocre executives fail upward. I watched women get ignored, patronized, screamed at, and passed over. I watched corporations reward ego and punish humanity. I watched an industry convince itself it was inventing the future while reproducing every flaw of the present.

I consider that a pretty straightforward indictment of not just the metaverse, not just AI, but tech en masse. A rotten base cannot help but produce a dysfunctional superstructure.

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There were some other nice bits in there too.

Then slowly the place started hollowing me out.

Part of it was the culture itself. The entire environment revolved around employee comfort, but only for the “real” employees. The “real” employees were predominantly men, the kitchen staff and cleaning crew were where you would find most of the women who worked at Meta.

The absurdity of working alongside so-called "contractors" and then seeing them barred from the fruits of our collective labour is a common enough radicalizing point, it seems. It also seems that women hold up more than half of the sky at Meta.

Nobody asks permission, it just becomes infrastructure. First it’s optional, then it’s normal, then it’s everywhere.

And the people shaping the next generation’s relationship to reality itself are not neutral actors.

As tech gains momentum, its quantitative inertia sublimates into qualitative infrastructure. Intervening at earlier stages is substantially more important if one wishes to head off that eventuality.

They also loved cheese to a degree I can only describe as extensively Midwestern. One of the executive chefs kept getting praised for his “innovative menus,” despite the fact that his primary menu innovation was putting more cheese on things.

Hey now. Innovation is innovation.

Can someone help me understand whether this is considered on-topic for Lobsters under the current moderation policy? It feels very LLM-processed – it's got the characteristic staccato rhythm, the "quietly", the "not X it's Y", the "not not not" in general, the "and honestly" stinger at the end – and like most LLM-processed writing it keeps circling aimlessly around a tiny handful of incredibly basic points (roughly "the people who work at big tech companies are flawed biased ordinary humans like you and me"). I also don't see much unique perspective being added here; the criticisms are the same ones that get regurgitated endlessly in a dozen other threads every day.

Is there something here that will help me improve my next program, especially if I'm already aware that big tech has big culture problems and systematically undervalues "non-technical" work? Is any criticism of big tech considered relevant, no matter how low-effort?

Can't remember where I heard it, but if you want to know what someone's really like, look at how they treat the help.

She goes from pointing out mismanagement in the food service division:

Another executive chef had previously been fired from a local culinary program after allegedly trying to run over a student he was secretly dating. At Meta he routinely messed up orders, copied menus, fell asleep in meetings, called women “baby,” sent sexts at work, and accumulated complaints from female employees for inappropriate behavior.

Management told us to “keep documenting.”

He eventually got fired after I left because he got caught watching porn during a meeting.

This is what I mean when I say I do not trust the people building AI.

To assuming that because there's mismanagement and incompetence in food service, the exact same issues must exist among the engineers creating AI:

And those are the people building artificial intelligence.

Not abstract supergeniuses. Not neutral machines. People. People who scream at coworkers. People who fail upward. People who confuse confidence for competence. People who watch porn in meetings. People who schedule meetings to discuss scheduling meetings.

Those aren't the people building artificial intelligence. Those are the people preparing food for the people who are building artificial intelligence.

If someone hires a housecleaner and then hires an SAT tutor for their child, if the housekeeper is terrible, it doesn't mean the SAT tutor is also incompetent just because they work for the same person. People generally put more scrutiny and investment into the SAT tutor than a housekeeper, and Meta definitely invests several orders of magnitude more into its AI engineering talent than its food service workers.

I don't trust Meta, and I agree with the publicly known evidence she shares, but it feels like she's trying hard to act as though she has a unique perspective on it when it doesn't sound like working in food service at Meta gave her any insight into the ability or intelligence of the engineers working on AI.