alt Hacker NewsThe flaw in the analogy is that oracle is made of people. It's not a lawnmower, it's a group of people with human motivations and human thoughts. It's true they don't HATE people, but it's also true they absolutely have no conscience in negotiations and have zero concern about relationships.
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Oh you fell into the trap... Just don't anthropomorphize Oracle...
The original was not even about Oracle the corporation, it was about understanding the psychology of Larry Ellison specifically.
> It's true they don't HATE people, but it's also true they absolutely have no conscience in negotiations and have zero concern about relationships.
Sure. Like a lawnmower.
It won't be made of people for long given how many Ellison is culling to prop up his gamble on AI data centres.
It's a joke that you're missing.
He's talking about the owner of Oracle, not the people who work there. It doesn't matter how many smart and talented real humans work at Oracle, the guy running it acts like a fleshy paperclip optimizer.
How many bureaucracies in history have behaved in deeply misanthropic ways, especially when led by misanthropic leaders?
Don't underestimate the power of the desire to keep one's job to cause a large organization to behave towards its own self-perpetuation despite the moral lines that must be crossed by individuals to do so.
> It's true they don't HATE people
Maybe so, but perhaps the most successful part of the AI marketing pitch has been exploiting management's hatred of labor (and vice versa).
A significant motivator for a lot of the nonsensical AI layoffs and initiatives over the last three years has been that it's a great opportunity for management to get ill on their slaves.
Tech labor got a little too big for their britches during the hiring spree of 2021, and AI was a great opportunity to take them down a peg, even if it offered little in the way of ROI.