It's no surprise. The wild tech optimism of the 1990s and 2000s has completely fallen apart as time and time again tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives. Perhaps edged out only by things such as actual violent crime and partisan hatred. (which itself, of course, is stoked to the absolute maximum in part due to technology trends in the past 15 years or so)
The loneliness epidemic, a constant drip-feed of outrage -- all so that people can make a small amount of money, distracted driving. Nearly every single service becoming worse over time, etc. Since then, the tech CEOs has been sidling up to the halls of power and effectively begging to help destroy privacy as thoroughly as possible.
I certainly know that my life was transformed for the worse by social media. And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes -- rather common culture was hollowed out, friends were distracted, friends fell down their own extremist rabbit holes. There is no successful social media company that actually cares about the negative impacts it has had on society. They speak about things such as "providing value" where value = time spent on the platform. They do not care if they ruin lives.
So a few years ago, nearly everywhere you went people are talking about how thoroughly AI was going to transform society. You couldn't go anywhere without hearing it. Of course people are wary. Big tech has been a net negative in very loud, intrusive, and obvious ways in _most_ people's lives. And now they're saying they're going to radically reform society.
The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal. For sure, if they really how the power to radically change everything, they would change it for the worse and would never spend a moment worrying about the damage they had done.
>The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal.
What even is the optimistic outcome if they are right? What are we all working towards? Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness? Because I legitimately can't see a realistic outcome that actually benefits society as a whole. It all ends with very few obscenely rich people getting even more obscenely rich. But I guess we could tell an AI to put ourselves in the new Marvel movie to pass the time since we no longer have any jobs.
> Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness?
I don’t get this. It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. It doesn’t make any sense. There is no secret formula to any of this. The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors.
One not-so-bad outcome would be that open weight models get better, smaller, more efficient, and easier to use while hardware gets faster, more efficient, and more widespread. Imagine when mobile CPUs have the GPU/NPU power of today's discrete GPUs and models are smaller and faster than today's models.
That allows really powerful local-first AI applications, rather than being beholden to AI providers. With the advance of coding agents, anyone can build their own applications.
The downstream effects of widespread local AIs is a rise in AI slop that feeds the distraction machine and attention economy as well as surveillance. I don't know what the solution to those is, but the local experience is going to be powerful.
It's beyond tech. Optimism in general is out of fashion, and pessimism is pervasive. The technology for delivering bad news and highly-engaging outrage-bait has developed much faster than our society has been able to adapt to it.
Just as americans don't trust AI or the tech industry, they don't trust any public institutions.
The fundamental problem is not AI or tech or institutions being bad. The fundamental problem is that the way we distribute information about the world has a deep negativity bias. This exists because the information economy is supported by advertisement, which requires attention to profit, and attention is easiest to attract with negativity. "If it bleeds, it leads" has been true forever.
It's scrollable algo video. This is at the root of essentially all of our current cultural woes. I was in denial about this for a long time, but atp it's undeniable.
This... this... this! This resonates soooo deeply with me.
The wild thing is that these tech "systems" (aka companies) are made up of ostensibly good people. It's often impossible to look at individual people and say, "they're the cause of this damage." I believe that some form of evil (this word feel inadequate) emerges amidst these large systems that is incredibly hard to pinpoint. It's why dissension is so fucking critical. Tech companies continue to profit from the status quo and we need courageous people who disrupt that.
> The wild thing is that these tech "systems" (aka companies) are made up of ostensibly good people.
I don't think that's the case. The people running these companies certainly aren't good people and everyone else in any position of power is either happy to hurt anyone and anything in exchange for a paycheck, or they're willing to take the money and turn a blind eye to the things they know are wrong. It's difficult to know where people stop being complicit. The amazon warehouse employee who is forced to piss in bottles or wear diapers to keep their job isn't really the problem, and I'm sure many of them hate the company they work for, but the company only works because of their efforts.
> ... tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives. Perhaps edged out only by things such as actual violent crime
Not so fast. Violent crime has been declining for about 30 years. Tech has been ascendant in that time.
> I certainly know that my life was transformed for the worst by social media. And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes
This aspect isn't talked about enough. We discuss plenty the direct impact of social media on its users, but little about how it effects even those who don't use social media at all, by proxy. Little is said how it's impossible to escape being profiled and having shadow profiles on these products just by virtue of everyone else in your life around you using them.
That's a huge problem. There is no possible way to opt out, at all.
This comment resonated with me in a way that few pieces of writing do. My only complaint is that it’s perhaps too short. I get the impression that you could turn this comment into longer post (with citations) and I encourage you to do so.
> And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes -- rather common culture was hollowed out, friends were distracted, friends fell down their own extremist rabbit holes.
Yeah... It's actually not so hard for me to just not take part in social media. The big struggle is that what I'd like to leave more than anything is a world born of its influence. The small percentage of people who are willing to go outward to places beyond the bounds of ten or so websites/apps of the Internet are still vastly influenced by them even when they reach outside. And despite that it would only take a handful of people "defecting" to form a nice tightly knit community, it's hard to find that many people with a common thread tying them together that aren't afflicted with behavior influenced by social media.
I don't want to just have places on the Internet that are actually "secretly" kind of like offshoots of Twitter/Reddit/Discord communities. That's almost not better and yet it's what a lot of attempts at "hey we're doing forums again" tends to feel like.
It’s like trying to give up smoking when all your friends still smoke. Even if you do give it up you either also give up your friends or still reek of cigarettes.
Anecdotally, my disappointment has a lot less to do with flaws in the technology itself as opposed to the failed expectations on the more-implicit social / political / power-dynamic side of things. The tiny factory in your palm isn't your capital, it's an outpost or snitch on behalf of someone else.
It's like being excited about the dawn of spaceships and then--oops--somehow there are no limits on launch pollution, there's a spaceship monopoly, and the average migrant must enter into multi-generational indentured servitude.
Life is like a supermarket. You are supposed to seek out the good things. You can't stop and stand and rage in the first aisle, which is filled with ultra processed food for the masses. You have to seek out the good ingredients in the back and make an effort.
You can't get stuck in life being disappointed in average people. You have to seek out good people. And good places and good things.
Or stay in the cranky cynic rabbit hole. God knows there are unlimited amounts of other cranky people to back you up. Maybe even the majority?
You are naive, you don't seriously expect people to "seek out the good ingredients" do you? When the shit ingredients are addictive, cheaper than the good ones and more available? The entire premise of these platforms is use whatever edges possible to get more ad money, they do that by getting people addicted to their phones and using psychological tricks that have been refined through over a decade of A/B testing to be effective.
I wish we could unplug AI especially when you watch videos of tech folks saying it could destroy us. Umm well then.
Yet i guess it's here to stay and AI needs us, our human content to stay relevant and thrive. Personally, I think it should pay all of us (set up some system or systems) for every piece of content we create daily & choose to publish. THat way we all thrive for keeping it relevant and it thrives alongside us. Wrote about one idea / a system that would get us paid for the daily content we produce via living each day https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...
But, again I'd be happy if all of society and cultures unplugged it!
People just forget the before times. No one wants to go back to printing out driving directions or emailing photos. We take all these things for granted now but I am 100 certain the technology we have now has saved hundreds of millions of lives through downstream butterfly effects.
I am not so sure. The world of printing out driving directions or emailing photos sounds a lot more calm. Also, simply quite enjoyable. The current world is cramming too many events in too little time, it seems. Stress is quite bad for health so I am not so sure about these hundreds of millions of lives saved. It may also have costed quite a few.
It was always an option to have the technology without the bullshit. We can have GPS without allowing Google or Apple to track our every movement. We can have useful websites without allowing the people running those websites to mine every scrap of data we upload and sell our private information to anyone willing to pay for it.
It's not a requirement that every technology sold must be used against the customer, we just haven't reached a point where we say enough is enough and outlaw such consumer hostile practices. Instead we've been allowing the corporations who seek to screw us over at every opportunity to gain more and more influence over the governments that could constrain them making it harder for us to fight back against the abuses we're subjected to.
Yes, I am from the olden times, the dark times… Times of fear and terror, printer not working, having to write things down by hand, ach, the horror… Today much better, says me, yass the foundations of democracy and fabric of society has been eaten away like by millions of worms, teenagers constantly fighting with mental illnesses, lies and disinformation, young strong lads drug or gambling addicts… but, the minor conveniences, my lad! Ach, those I would not live without. The minor conveniences…
When I use a computer to do work I want the computer to be right. I want to be able to trust the computer. With the inherit non-determinism and probabilistic nature of generative-AI, that fundamental reason why I engage a computer is lost.
If the spreadsheet is wrong, it’s because the math is wrong, it’s because I made a mistake. It’s not because all of a sudden the computer decided the nature of algebra should be different than it is.
Part of the reason why humans are rejecting AI is that we are putting it in places where it makes no sense, or places where humans prefer a human in the loop, there are plenty of places where machine learning algorithms make sense, but customer service is not one of them.
This is an interesting way of thinking about it. I generally agree. I especially agree that anti-AI sentiment partially comes from miss-using it. However:
Determinism isn't a requirement for 100% correctness.
A Las Vegas algorithm is randomized, non-deterministic and guarantees 100% correctness [0].
The execution can be different every time but the result will always be correct. determinism does not lose accuracy. It does lose time predictability.
So if your problem with AI is accuracy, then in theory your problem is just premature stopping.
The computer should be a force for order, because being a living creature is chaos.
That said LLMs can be used in ways that promote order. People just got excited and wanted to believe they could be trusted in chaos mode.
For reference chaos mode would be prompting something like: "Look at my journal entries and tell me what I should do to fix my life". Versus using one to build a table of common themes and analyzing the resulting spreadsheet yourself.
I think we got excited / wanted to believe that we won't have to expend any effort whatsoever, and the AI could "do it all".
The reality (as far as I can comprehend it) seems to be that AI expanded the scope of what we can shove into one mouthful, and now it takes much more effort to chew. Metaphorically speaking.
Part of the reason coding agents are widely accepted and used is that human coders are chaos, and human coders have spent a lot of time building tooling to ameliorate chaos. Everything from git to language design, to lint, to profilers, etc. was built to keep the human chaos out. It's pretty good at keeping the LLM chaos out, and when it blows up anyway you can roll it back to the previous commit.
Correctness can also be guaranteed by non-deterministic systems [0]. You do trade time predictability though. It will eventually give the correct answer, we just dont know when.
I keep thinking about the implications of this. So in some sense it's less about being inaccurate and more about prematurely stopping, or not having a well defined target.
In theory if the target is well defined and it never prematurely stops, the question changes from "will the output be correct" to "when will it be done?"
working with a non deterministic tool requires taste and judgement. if you want full determinism AI is not for you but it has a market for other people?
> there are plenty of places where machine learning algorithms make sense, but customer service is not one of them.
You're optimising for quality, where as companies optimise for some balance of quality and cost.
AI might not be quite as good as a skilled human, but it's often good enough and a lot cheaper, so companies use it.
I actually think customer service is one of the few places it makes sense to use AI – at least to some degree. AI can provide immediate support to customer queries, and can usually handle the majority of basic issues customers have. You might need to escalate to a human in edge cases, but that's how you balance quality and cost.
Reality is non-deterministic (not actually, but in practice). We do strange things to balance this out all the time. Thinking that computer software must be exempt from that mess as a goal is just strange, and concerns itself too much with the ideal of a tool and not enough with the more important question: What if our lives get much, much better? Roughly everyone wants more out of life including the top one percent (and I don't mean the top 0.0001%, just your ordinary industrial nation doctors). How could we possibly morally justify denying everyone the best shot to get at least to that level, and I mean living people RIGHT NOW, ASAP not in a few hundred years? Who would be okay to say "yeah but you know, artists, copyright" and deny those who benefit most from this the opportunity?
How could we not take this shot? I understand perfectly well that a lot of things will need reconfiguration and that it's going to be painful, but dear lord, let's focus on making it go well instead of ending it.
> Thinking that computer software must be exempt from that mess as a goal is just strange
Software is deterministic, it has been since its inception[0]. Why go from something objective/provable to something that does "strange things", when we already have former? It's like making bricks out of paper and declaring "actually, this is logical next step for bricks because stuff waves in the wind".
> What if our lives get much, much better?
What if not?
[0] (Yes not really/actually if we're being pedantic)
> How could we possibly morally justify denying everyone the best shot to get at least to that level, and I mean living people RIGHT NOW, ASAP not in a few hundred years?
>What if our lives get much, much better? Roughly everyone wants more out of life including the top one percent (and I don't mean the top 0.0001%, just your ordinary industrial nation doctors). How could we possibly morally justify denying everyone the best shot to get at least to that level, and I mean living people RIGHT NOW, ASAP not in a few hundred years?
This is satire, right?
If you seriously think that AI is going to improve the lives of anyone except the robber barons who own the AI you are absolutely delusional.
In the survey, 31% Americans believe AI will have an "equally positive and negative impact", and 13% are "not sure"; it's 16% pro 44% N/A 40% anti.
I wish the survey also included non-Americans, because from a 2025 survey (https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-aro...) people from other countries were less concerned; those from Israel and South Korea were more optimistic than pessimistic.
Notably, Pew did this survey 14 months ago and the results were better, but not by much: 17% pro 49% N/A 35% anti. They also did a survey in 2023, and already 50% of US respondents were "more concerned than excited" about AI, while only 10% were "more excited than concerned".
The pushback I see everywhere outside of tech suggests the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest. The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet as much as it likes to think it does.
I think the tech industry is overestimating its value. Because it can code they think it can do anything else, but unlike code a lot of other work can't have a bunch of little bugs and mistakes because you can't open up real life and edit it after the fact. Plus it lacks actual reasoning to solve novel problems.
Hiring an engineer to finetooth comb blueprints for mistakes before construction will take nearly as much time as having an engineer draft them themselves. And they will be smart enough to not do something silly like putting the electrical panel on the back of the shower wall. If you just vibecode some blueprints and start construction without the comb you could lose way more than you saved with something as simple as pouring a support pillar or building a wall 2 inches off and having to tear it out later and rebuild.
The success of AI doesn't hinge on whether you can vibecode it all or even one particular sector really well. For example, despite several attempts to make vibecoding PCBs, it's still pretty crap. But it's really useful as a copilot, human in the loop for targeted tasks in electronics. Same for CAD work, not so good at drawing but still useful at looking at an image, understanding it, and answering specific questions.
Whether the value attached to these companies is grounded in reality is a different question.
Definitely. The secret will be identifying use cases where AI usage is a potential upside with limited downside, not the current blanket statements about replacing all jobs without considering lifetime ROI. There’s a lot of boring work AI can automate with minimal risk. There’s also the potential to decrease risk with AI too, including ensembles of different AIs modals and AI + human.
Frontier model companies aren’t banking on the general public “wanting” AI. They are on a path to a product that won’t need to be wanted because the entire economy will need it.
I'd argue the economy is propped up on pointless work providing employment. If you throw AI in that it'll contract and it'll either collapse entirely or move to a social care model that no one will foot and rapid class division. You'll end up with burning or unused datacentres that is all.
Any economic model that I've seen leads to failure. The only reason it's popular now is that numbers are going up. People are just edging it.
It's more telling of the state of economy right now than AI.
Capital is simply going from bubble to bubble to pop. It was NFTs and Web3, then the metaverse, now it's AI. You need a new speculative product, market demand be damned. Ultimately the tech itself is inconsequential. Sure, AI is somehow more useful than an hashed png picture of a monkey smoking a joint, but the AI frenzy would've happened anyway.
I can imagine some other alternate universe where it's the turn of something already commonplace instead, like cloud computing; and the same CEOs that are screaming right now that we need to burn the ecosystem to build their new AI data centers would've told us that "The Cloud is inevitable", and that we need to spend 80% of the GDP to finance their AWS competitors or whatever.
I really think there’s a concerted effort by the media to demonize AI though. Every third story I see on my news feeds is some sensationalist story about how AI/data centers are bad.
The media does have an interest in doing this—writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.
> The media does have an interest in doing this—writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.
Maybe, but it's also pretty clear that the entire purpose and intent of delivering "AI" to the economy is to wholly wipe out labor. Do I think that's realistic? No. SpaceX's total addressable market (TAM) in their S-1 filing to go public stated as much. Their TAM is $28.5T(!) with $26.5T of it being AI. That's larger than the US GDP (~$24T). You can only throw numbers like that around if you're explicitly aiming to replace labor, no matter how realistic it is.
Personally, I'm tired of mediocre people who've attained some amount of business success turning around and trying to dismantle democratic systems because it's incompatible with their world view.
It's more than reasonable to complain about these things night and day. The alternative to vocal complaints won't be pretty.
44% of Americans believe AI will have a neutral impact while 40% believe it will have a negative impact. Just to note - about half as many Americans believe AI will have a positive impact as believe in telepathy. Believing AI will have a positive impact is officially a fringe belief.
The media are followers here, not leaders. 84% of people can't agree on the color blue[0]. Don't try to make excuses for a few billionaires finding the limit of their reality distortion field.
Altman, Amodei, Musk and other tech industry leaders (not to mention technologists like Hinton) are constantly making public statements that predict everything from massive job loss, to restructuring of society to the possibility of an end to our species. The media is taking their cue from the tech industry itself.
> I really think there’s a concerted effort by the media to demonize AI though
That sounds literally insane to me. This is not coming from the media, many of the same people that own the media have a vested interest in this particular US political administration... which is also basically all of big tech.
Memes have associations, connotations, subtleties in how they're used in different contexts - they're a communication medium. A well applied meme is like (it isn't - but it can be viewed similarly to) poetry where you've matched your idea with an evocative statement to a perfect degree and the subtleties and implications in your head are well and fully transferred to the reader. An AI meme is like a dry technical paper that lays out all of the information in a kludgy unimaginative manner. Good meme based communication relies on a lot of audience understanding and can draw people together as a demonstration of kinship.
They didn't overestimate the interest. ChatGPT is extremely popular and notable.
>The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet
Of course they don't, but they are still allowed to make a product, and pivot if there's no consumer demand. However there is huge consumer and business demand for AI so they are justified in making the investments they are.
It is not ok to lobby and manipulate governments for fiscal policy changes to write off the costs and risks on the general public.
We MUST be entirely insulated from their failure as society. If they can't raise the capital for the product then they should fail quietly and insignificantly which is not what is going to happen at the moment.
Citation needed. Most people use it once a while but not daily; they tried it once and played a bit with it but then forgot about it because it’s not clear what they should use it for.
I have said this before, I just can NOT understand how you can measure adoption of a technology or product without giving people a full opt-out.
This is very basic in technology products.
It is very easy to say that Gmail AI product has 1.8 Billion users because there are about 1.8 Billion Gmail accounts/users and they have absolutely no way of completely opting out. (opting out without the company punishing users by taking away important features)
A simple A/B Test with just 50,000 or 100,000 users depending on the product will give everyone the REAL picture of where users stand.
> the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest.
You should consider that the industry is just lying to make everyone believe that everyone else is interested. Creating a sense of inevitability. It's the same trick that every ad out there uses, selling you a profitable fantasy as reality.
Because the writing is on the wall already. Who hasn't been annoyed with "AI customer service", we already read about AI in the military, then you have the envisioned huge loss of jobs.
People generally seem to like using it as a chatbot, or answer questions, on their own terms. But anywhere it's been forced against the user asking for it has been a disaster.
Very true. I work for an AI company, I use it every day, it's a huge value add for certain problems.
My heat pump died the other day and I called an HVAC place and got an AI agent, which was frustrating and not helpful. So I called a different HVAC place and spoke to someone who could actually help, then I gave them lots of money.
Similarly: was calling apartments to ask about them / schedule a tour before I moved in, rejected the second best option specifically because they only had AI agents on the phone
I called siriusxm to get them to turn off their stupid advertising on my in-car infotainment
I had called like 3 months ago to do the same thing. The human agent confirmed she turned it off on my account
I called again recently and asked the AI to turn off in-car ads and weather alerts. The ai INSISTED this was my car's manufacturer responsibility.
I kept yelling and swearing until it finally transferred me to a human. The human confirmed that it was a part of sirius AND that the feature was disabled (it turns out that disabled features on inactive accounts automatically become re-active on 'free weekends'. Holy fuck that seems illegal. the only way to disable features during free weekends is to have an active account (aka paying them)).
My next car is going to be seriously driven by a lack of connectivity, lack of sirirusxm. I'll buy a car where someone already figured out how to physically remove the radio
It's kind of hilarious, and a pretty obvious externality, most of these layoffs are clearly just restructuring that the companies want an excuse for but by labeling them as modernization and AI driven they've caused a major image problem for AI for the one thing it hasn't actually done much of (outside of really stupid companies - like the ones that fired their whole teams and moved their workforce to India as soon as they heard how cheap the labor was there).
I don't like AI customer service either, but having seen the other side it cuts down huge amounts of inbound queries (where the answer can usually be found in knowledge bases) and provides an answer faster than a human would. As long as the escalation path to talk to a human isn't too arduous it's not too bad.
I think the key issue here is that the people deciding how long the escalation path is isn't the humans (a fair few people do opt into search company FAQs for their answer before dialing a hotline - you're robbing those people in particular of their time by forcing them back through the same FAQ steps and discouraging the usage of those opt-in low cost resources) and, right now, consumer protection and rights are at an all time low so a fair number of AI rollouts have been downright customer malicious.
It absolutely has a place in the system - but that place (in the companies that do it well) starts by giving call center employees access to the AI as a fallback when they don't know an answer and reduces the amount of information and product specialization needed. Assuming it is ranked highly by internal teams then you can consider shifting it from being an internal tool to one exposed externally - instead, in a lot of cases, companies have just switched off the ability to dial in without going through the AI hoops and, in the worst cases, if there's a tech issue where the call center disconnects from the customer, the customer is forced to go through all those hoops again.
I like to emphasize that AI is a tool - it can be applied well in a considered and thoughtful manner - or it can be rolled out to every conceivable usage with reckless abandon... we're in a place where number two is the dominant approach.
The escalation path is always too arduous though, because most people still prefer to talk to a human when they’ve got to the point of opening a chat window. You’ve always got to jump through a bunch of hoops which are basically answering yes when asked whether you’ve tried reading the website.
I hate the AI customer service, from drive thru to call center AI complete with fake background sounds, I hate it all. As a customer I find it insulting.
Does not at all surprise me that people don't think losing their livelihoods would have a positive impact. Maybe AI companies should stop bragging about trying to do that if they're concerned about people hating them.
How much of this is due to AI vs. the government and corporate structures in society? (Saw elsewhere that Chinese people were also much more optimistic)
Asian countries have governments that are at least seemingly vested in the interests of their populace. They have significant political and economic safety nets in place that can assure their populations that the government is at least somewhat aligned with the populace.
Instead for many western countries, chiefly The USA, You have a society that very blatantly is restructuring itself to service capital holders and not the population.
These Governments are not aligned with their people, and are instead trying to solidify Stratified Economies where the entire engine of the country moves in service of its rich.
If the promise of AI is to provide intellectual labor in exchange for capital, the population loses its only remaining middle class made up of knowledge-workers which still hold a semblance of political power.
If the middle collapses like this, the only means of social mobility will become high-risk gambles or crime.
it seems like Chinese people have much more faith in their govt than Western countries, and subsequently trust them more in distributing the benefits of AI (in aggregate ofc)
I guess I'd say the latter, although I think that fact does not quite have the valence that Western critics might assume. Vietnam, one of the most AI-positive countries in this poll, is explicitly planning (https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/commun...) to use AI to suppress dissent and achieve permanent authoritarian control of the Vietnamese information ecosystem. I think they might be right that it'll work!
> Despite all of the skepticism, a whole lot of Americans also report using AI in their daily lives on an increasingly regular basis. About a quarter of Americans say they use AI chatbots on a daily basis. Those who do are typically using the chatbots for research purposes or for work, Pew says.
Yeah, we don't have a choice. These things were foisted upon us, and now we all just have to deal with it, so long as we want to keep being employed/employable.
Yes, "use this or be fired" tends to have an impact. A friend once made a analogy to opium: Sure, it's supposed to be addictive, but if you say no anyways, we're going to show up with gunboats.
AI epitomises chasing a narrow definition of progress that benefits the few (increasing profits via automation) over a holistic definition of progress that benefits the many (reducing poverty, improving health, providing meaning). It's no wonder people hate it.
Not surprising and well deserved: our industry has done a remarkably poor job at balancing public and shareholder interests. Of course that isn’t the _only_ industry in this situation, but its deep intricacies into personal lives and psyches has made it particularly bad.
The boss of the main private TV channel in France famously said in 90s that his job consisted in “selling brain time to advertisers”. What was handicraft has been turned into a mass extraction business by the Google and Facebook of our world. AI is the cherry on the cake, really.
Surprisingly high number given that people are being told by tech CEO that AI will replace all white collar jobs soon and a few years later AI guided robots will replace all blue collar jobs too.
It is to America’s great fortune that her technological innovations are not passed by committee. In particular, polls always capture the status quo. Other things that were widely unpopular: interracial marriage, gay marriage. And especially for technology, public opinion led to the stalling of fission power in the US.
So hurray for ignoring the majority of people. I’m glad people can offer other people services in a generally neutral way without needing to pass a committee.
Interracial and gay marriage were not "wildly unpopular" "technological innovations". What an extraordinary stretch to try to tie the in-fact deeply unpopular, job-destroying and wealth-concentrating AI boom to human--HUMAN--rights victories.
Everyone is going to dislike this comment because you're cutting across two different polarized groups and comment sections rarely champion the middle ground.
Amusingly, I actually tried something like this using /r/wallstreetbets and there was no signal I could extract on a sufficiently small scale. Far dominated by Trump antics and rate actions. Perhaps others will have better luck.
Claude has been quite helpful in reviewing my investments, and I have made a fair amount of money on his advice. His availability is unparalleled compared to any sort of financial planner.
Professionally, I have run my programs and scripts through Copilot/OpenAI and sometimes received caustic and fiery criticism, but others praise with helpful suggestions. Oftentimes it does make fundamental mistakes.
The threats of the end of the white collar class are not unduely worrying to me, as my retirement is close. Still, the whole of the culture is begin driven neurotic.
My answers to this question are personal, and atypical. Perhaps there will be general good in this somewhere, though it may be hard to see.
> Claude has been quite helpful in reviewing my investments, and I have made a fair amount of money on his advice. His availability is unparalleled compared to any sort of financial planner.
Just out of curiosity, what are some investment moves that you made as a result of Claude's advice?
I believe the current pessimistic atmosphere has very little to do with AI.
Sure, only 16% of Americans think AI will have a positive impact. But if you ask if they believe smart phone, social media, metaverse, crypto, etc will have a positive impact I highly doubt you'll get a much bigger number.
> Pew writes that 44 percent of U.S. adults now say they use OpenAI’s chatbot, a figure that’s more than doubled since 2023.
> The next most popular chatbot is Gemini (24 percent), followed by Copilot (17 percent) and MetaAI (14 percent), with Grok (8 percent), Claude (6 percent) and Character.ai (3 percent) lagging behind.
Claude in 6th place, behind Gemini and Copilot and MetaAI and Grok?
No wonder the general public still think AI is junk.
The question there was "% of U.S. adults who say they ever use the following AI chatbots", so it's not a measure of overall usage, just exposure. Not surprising Gemini and Grok and MetaAI rank higher then.
I think there is a valid point here that Anthropic has a found a great product-market fit among programmers.
By comparison, all the rest of the tools non-programmers get exposure to are floundering around trying to be everything to everyone. It's a push not a pull.
The rest of the pack, when given everyday real-world computing tasks, for people that don't know what a terminal is, just suck. (e.g. "copilot, fix the spacing issue in this word document" or literally any apple genmoji attempt with more than two basic english words)
I had a big culture shock moment when I had to prep some slides a few weeks back. I'd assumed it would be a breeze now: I've always been good at making slide decks, I had a clear classification-friendly idea of exactly what I wanted them to look like, and there's even an AI native integration! Nope, didn't work, just had to shuffle components around like I always have.
My observation of society is that, by default, people tend to have a belief system of "most tech that existed before I was born was fine; any new tech is bad/unnecessary".
So it doesn't surprise me that people are predisposed to not like this particular new tech.
At the core, this is what the pessimism is about. If AI replicates the advent of personal computers and the Internet, our society will look more like India where everyone has technology but only 5-10% of people live really well
It's weird. For me the problem stems from how society uses AI, not from AI itself. I personally had totally positive experiences in my job but seeing people using ChatGPT like some magic truth machien is scary.
Well, everywhere AI is being sold in a way to replace humans. Humans don't want to think about having to use a product at work that is genuinely aimed at actually replacing their job.
AI is still a tool for complex tasks. Reaching impactful everyday use for regular users will take time. It is not clear who they interviewed for this study. It would be good to see how people in specific industries feel about AI.
The one and only product for AI is labor displacement and wage suppression. That's why companies love it. That's why people hate it. We don't live in a society where the benefits will be shared. We live in a society that would rather let people die in the streets than potentially hurt shareholder value.
We are bouldering towards the total collapse of society. To me, it's like 10,000 people want to rule the post-apocalyptic world (Fallout style) where asking "maybe we shouldn't have the apocalypse?" is heresy.
the AI bros would counterargue and say that with all the increased productivity, it will just open up more opportunities and thus more jobs. But, i don't think we're seeing that. Net jobs seems to be going down.
That's what I am thinking. Things are moving fast so from the inside the tech bubble it seems that everyone wants to use AI. That is not true for most people.
I think one positive thing that might come of this is for AI to act as a sort of counterweight to the fragmentation of reality into different filter bubbles.
It might be difficult to make models that have useful, high intelligence, but also are very biased. It could create a sort of grounding in logic and reality.
Grok might actually be early evidence of this. Despite the bad press it gets, it's really not so bad.
It's a shame, as AI will improve healthcare on an unprecedented scale.
I cannot get a specialist without referrals and endless appointments to spend more than 30min to discuss how to fix a serious issues. Claude? Hours and hours of back and forth. Public models now beat the specialized ones like OpenEvidence. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04431-5
Diagnostics is getting blown apart by AI, the best cancer screening will be available in even remote corners of this world.
We were constrained by the available brain mass of highly trained specialists - and this bottleneck is getting removed.
Hard not to be optimistic on AI if you're in healthcare.
I think views on AI are not really views on AI, they are views on capitalism. People don't feel optimistic that AI's impact will benefit ordinary people because, even if works out, the benefit will accrue only to capital owners. This view feels pretty understandable to me, but is ultimately orthogonal to whether AI is useful and effective for the kind of tasks we want to leverage it for.
This is an accurate take. From a tech perspective, AI and ML are great. It's a neat and successful experiment that has a lot to offer.
The fact it's being pushed on all of us as this panacea for the cost of human effort is just disgusting, even if the technology is truly impressive.
Every company salivated at the thought of using AI to enrich themselves, but not a single thought seems to have been given to the human element of it all.
That makes sense, but I would love to see the data on it. I don't doubt at all that capitalism in isolation is viewed more favourably in the US, but that doesn't preclude the intersection of AI and capitalism being viewed less favourably.
I suppose my comment should've said "views on AI aren't solely views on AI, they are views on AI as it intersects with capitalism"
That's part of it, but views on AI are also views on art and authenticity. I'm a huge fan of AI for coding, research and writing for work. When I see AI generated images, music or anything else "creative" my reaction has grown to be pretty negative. It's all got NFT vibes aesthetically.
I was absolutely blown away by Stable Diffusion and that AI could generate images, now I'm kind of disgusted with it. We've been flooded with low artistic value output and people are having a natural reaction to that.
AI will be the most important thing to happen to art. We have tolerated low quality art for far too long because we pretend mechanical dexterity is what makes art, art. Art is not valuable because of this. AI removes the part I never cared about. I never cared that a guitarist can physically play 1500 notes a second.
Agree. I actually think we'll see a resurgence in art and graphic design as a consequence. At least for now people can spot AI generated artifacts and many immediately have a negative reaction to it. I don't read blog posts that feature AI generated images, even though they are only slightly worse than stuff cribbed form Unsplash.
The thing is the vast majority has never given a shit about authenticity though. All of the top pop stars are performing music made by committees and designed by marketing teams. Most music sold is and has been lowest common denominator trash since TV was invented. It's hilarious to see some Katy Perry fan frothing at the mouth about AI not being authentic art. As if they ever cared. Most mainstream entertainment is designed to placate and distract. And I'm not even saying mainstream is bad, there's nothing wrong with catchy. It's the crocodile tears over authenticity that bothers me.
I think that the smartphone is the single worst thing to happen, not so much AI. AI will hopefully help deal with reckless people typing in their smartphones while driving etc.
Make no mistake: I am as much perpetrator as victim. While I am having even days off of my smartphone and never use it during driving, I am at least as much affected and addicted as most of us.
It's the people not technology. Way back before AI was the hot issue, Eric Schmidt said a new bar for being tone deaf by going straight for saying privacy is dead get over it. Not "here are some tools to retain some privacy," not "here is some legislation to punish privacy violations," just get over it.
It's gotten worse from there. The "dark enlightenment." Flirting with fascism. Creating the biggest meme stocks in history and promoting that as accomplishment. You're not fooling enough people. We might not be in your face about it, but we know you're not good people.
Most of what AI is visibly used for is very unwelcome for American consumers: spam, propaganda, bad art, bad memes, marketing calls, bad phone support... Then the future promise is mass unemployment... of course Americans are negative on it. What is the upside for them?
It's pretty telling that only 16% have a positive view on it, then. If even Trump has more than twice as high approval than your product, you've royally fucked up.
This wildly assumes that "I voted for $candidate" means "I like $candidate." Every presidential election cycle we get served up two turds, one with a (D) and the other with an (R) by their name, and we have to pick which turd we'd like to ruin our country for us the least.
while I’d say that was true in most elections, this one the choices for the future couldn’t be more stark. The dude just had a UFC on the white house lawn, for instance, and fell into the Iran/Israel trap every previous president had avoided. But yeah, Kamala and Trump are the same level of turdness /s.
50% of the S&P 500 valuation is now directly related to AI as are 40% of new layoffs.
A quote often attributed to Stalin/Lenin/Marx is something like, "Capitalists will sell the rope to be used to hang them".
AI is taking this even further. Corps are effectively borrowing tons of money in order to build the rope to hang the middle class --- to be followed by hanging themselves.
The idea that you can lay off the middle class and business will continue as usual is a capitalistic fantasy. Without jobs, people can't afford to buy products built with AI.
it’s not been useful anywhere else - no self driving cars, no laundry helpers - just some idiotic animatronic carcasses that are barely able to walk around, and semi autonomous killer bots on ukraine frontlines.
I saw over a dozen self driving cars on my way to work today. Weave Robotics launched a laundry helper months ago, although my sense is that "laundry folding" is a bit of a meme and people don't actually care very much about automating it.
> and semi autonomous killer bots on ukraine frontlines.
They did fully autonomous tests in 2022 through 2024. Something like everything in a 5km radius was dead. Various sources in mainstream media online about this now.
It's hard to balance the downsides (devastating job losses that will affect certain fields) with the upsides (curing diseases, increasing efficiency in ways that will reduce costs of many goods).
Is something a net benefit if everything is cheaper and cancer is cured, but you have no job?
This is less insightful than what people might want to read into it. The democratic party has adopted an anti-ai stance as a position in the partisan football game. NPR tote bag carriers read with great concern about AI's terrible water usage (in reality a tiny fraction of that used in things such as lawns), and about the fact that it can do a better job than amateur artists.
On the other side, you don't see a similar upswell in support from the right. AI companies are from San Francisco, and their CEOs are weird, awkward, and probably gay abortion lovers.
It's no surprise. The wild tech optimism of the 1990s and 2000s has completely fallen apart as time and time again tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives. Perhaps edged out only by things such as actual violent crime and partisan hatred. (which itself, of course, is stoked to the absolute maximum in part due to technology trends in the past 15 years or so)
The loneliness epidemic, a constant drip-feed of outrage -- all so that people can make a small amount of money, distracted driving. Nearly every single service becoming worse over time, etc. Since then, the tech CEOs has been sidling up to the halls of power and effectively begging to help destroy privacy as thoroughly as possible.
I certainly know that my life was transformed for the worse by social media. And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes -- rather common culture was hollowed out, friends were distracted, friends fell down their own extremist rabbit holes. There is no successful social media company that actually cares about the negative impacts it has had on society. They speak about things such as "providing value" where value = time spent on the platform. They do not care if they ruin lives.
So a few years ago, nearly everywhere you went people are talking about how thoroughly AI was going to transform society. You couldn't go anywhere without hearing it. Of course people are wary. Big tech has been a net negative in very loud, intrusive, and obvious ways in _most_ people's lives. And now they're saying they're going to radically reform society.
The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal. For sure, if they really how the power to radically change everything, they would change it for the worse and would never spend a moment worrying about the damage they had done.
>The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal.
What even is the optimistic outcome if they are right? What are we all working towards? Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness? Because I legitimately can't see a realistic outcome that actually benefits society as a whole. It all ends with very few obscenely rich people getting even more obscenely rich. But I guess we could tell an AI to put ourselves in the new Marvel movie to pass the time since we no longer have any jobs.
> Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness?
I don’t get this. It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. It doesn’t make any sense. There is no secret formula to any of this. The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors.
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I'm legit pretty excited about applying AI to accelerate biological and medical discovery.
It's already happening right now, still in relatively mundane ways, but there's so much to do.
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What are jobs for?
Should we have them?
Should they be mandatory?
What does it mean to have to work to eat, is this a good setup?
Does everyone have to work?
Should they?
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One not-so-bad outcome would be that open weight models get better, smaller, more efficient, and easier to use while hardware gets faster, more efficient, and more widespread. Imagine when mobile CPUs have the GPU/NPU power of today's discrete GPUs and models are smaller and faster than today's models.
That allows really powerful local-first AI applications, rather than being beholden to AI providers. With the advance of coding agents, anyone can build their own applications.
The downstream effects of widespread local AIs is a rise in AI slop that feeds the distraction machine and attention economy as well as surveillance. I don't know what the solution to those is, but the local experience is going to be powerful.
It's beyond tech. Optimism in general is out of fashion, and pessimism is pervasive. The technology for delivering bad news and highly-engaging outrage-bait has developed much faster than our society has been able to adapt to it.
Just as americans don't trust AI or the tech industry, they don't trust any public institutions.
The fundamental problem is not AI or tech or institutions being bad. The fundamental problem is that the way we distribute information about the world has a deep negativity bias. This exists because the information economy is supported by advertisement, which requires attention to profit, and attention is easiest to attract with negativity. "If it bleeds, it leads" has been true forever.
It's scrollable algo video. This is at the root of essentially all of our current cultural woes. I was in denial about this for a long time, but atp it's undeniable.
This... this... this! This resonates soooo deeply with me.
The wild thing is that these tech "systems" (aka companies) are made up of ostensibly good people. It's often impossible to look at individual people and say, "they're the cause of this damage." I believe that some form of evil (this word feel inadequate) emerges amidst these large systems that is incredibly hard to pinpoint. It's why dissension is so fucking critical. Tech companies continue to profit from the status quo and we need courageous people who disrupt that.
> The wild thing is that these tech "systems" (aka companies) are made up of ostensibly good people.
I don't think that's the case. The people running these companies certainly aren't good people and everyone else in any position of power is either happy to hurt anyone and anything in exchange for a paycheck, or they're willing to take the money and turn a blind eye to the things they know are wrong. It's difficult to know where people stop being complicit. The amazon warehouse employee who is forced to piss in bottles or wear diapers to keep their job isn't really the problem, and I'm sure many of them hate the company they work for, but the company only works because of their efforts.
> ... tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives. Perhaps edged out only by things such as actual violent crime
Not so fast. Violent crime has been declining for about 30 years. Tech has been ascendant in that time.
> tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives
This. Many of us are cogs in these machines doing the harm...to ourselves and others around us.
The thing is, these companies can't exist without employees. But employees need the companies for money to pay the other companies.
We are rapidly reaching a point where companies will exist without human employees, there'll just be the owners and an ai workforce.
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> I certainly know that my life was transformed for the worst by social media. And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes
This aspect isn't talked about enough. We discuss plenty the direct impact of social media on its users, but little about how it effects even those who don't use social media at all, by proxy. Little is said how it's impossible to escape being profiled and having shadow profiles on these products just by virtue of everyone else in your life around you using them.
That's a huge problem. There is no possible way to opt out, at all.
This comment resonated with me in a way that few pieces of writing do. My only complaint is that it’s perhaps too short. I get the impression that you could turn this comment into longer post (with citations) and I encourage you to do so.
> And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes -- rather common culture was hollowed out, friends were distracted, friends fell down their own extremist rabbit holes.
Yeah... It's actually not so hard for me to just not take part in social media. The big struggle is that what I'd like to leave more than anything is a world born of its influence. The small percentage of people who are willing to go outward to places beyond the bounds of ten or so websites/apps of the Internet are still vastly influenced by them even when they reach outside. And despite that it would only take a handful of people "defecting" to form a nice tightly knit community, it's hard to find that many people with a common thread tying them together that aren't afflicted with behavior influenced by social media.
I don't want to just have places on the Internet that are actually "secretly" kind of like offshoots of Twitter/Reddit/Discord communities. That's almost not better and yet it's what a lot of attempts at "hey we're doing forums again" tends to feel like.
It’s like trying to give up smoking when all your friends still smoke. Even if you do give it up you either also give up your friends or still reek of cigarettes.
> The wild tech optimism of the 1990s and 2000s
Anecdotally, my disappointment has a lot less to do with flaws in the technology itself as opposed to the failed expectations on the more-implicit social / political / power-dynamic side of things. The tiny factory in your palm isn't your capital, it's an outpost or snitch on behalf of someone else.
It's like being excited about the dawn of spaceships and then--oops--somehow there are no limits on launch pollution, there's a spaceship monopoly, and the average migrant must enter into multi-generational indentured servitude.
I think social media is almost an oxymoron, as a medium is something "in the middle" and social contacts should be direct and not mediated (IMHO).
Life is like a supermarket. You are supposed to seek out the good things. You can't stop and stand and rage in the first aisle, which is filled with ultra processed food for the masses. You have to seek out the good ingredients in the back and make an effort.
You can't get stuck in life being disappointed in average people. You have to seek out good people. And good places and good things.
Or stay in the cranky cynic rabbit hole. God knows there are unlimited amounts of other cranky people to back you up. Maybe even the majority?
You are naive, you don't seriously expect people to "seek out the good ingredients" do you? When the shit ingredients are addictive, cheaper than the good ones and more available? The entire premise of these platforms is use whatever edges possible to get more ad money, they do that by getting people addicted to their phones and using psychological tricks that have been refined through over a decade of A/B testing to be effective.
At the moment, the main visible effect is disruption in the job market.
Everyone knows it's just another stake in the coffin.
I wish we could unplug AI especially when you watch videos of tech folks saying it could destroy us. Umm well then.
Yet i guess it's here to stay and AI needs us, our human content to stay relevant and thrive. Personally, I think it should pay all of us (set up some system or systems) for every piece of content we create daily & choose to publish. THat way we all thrive for keeping it relevant and it thrives alongside us. Wrote about one idea / a system that would get us paid for the daily content we produce via living each day https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...
But, again I'd be happy if all of society and cultures unplugged it!
People just forget the before times. No one wants to go back to printing out driving directions or emailing photos. We take all these things for granted now but I am 100 certain the technology we have now has saved hundreds of millions of lives through downstream butterfly effects.
I am not so sure. The world of printing out driving directions or emailing photos sounds a lot more calm. Also, simply quite enjoyable. The current world is cramming too many events in too little time, it seems. Stress is quite bad for health so I am not so sure about these hundreds of millions of lives saved. It may also have costed quite a few.
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It was always an option to have the technology without the bullshit. We can have GPS without allowing Google or Apple to track our every movement. We can have useful websites without allowing the people running those websites to mine every scrap of data we upload and sell our private information to anyone willing to pay for it.
It's not a requirement that every technology sold must be used against the customer, we just haven't reached a point where we say enough is enough and outlaw such consumer hostile practices. Instead we've been allowing the corporations who seek to screw us over at every opportunity to gain more and more influence over the governments that could constrain them making it harder for us to fight back against the abuses we're subjected to.
It's possible to have both internet maps and photo web sites, and not have unregulated* social media.
*Or rampant or whatever other word you feel fits the current state of social media.
How does not printing directions save hundreds of millions of lives?
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> $230 notebooks, digital cameras and tiny dollhouse furniture: How Gen Z’s desire to get offline is a boon for businesses
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/03/going-analog-gen-z-desire-to...
Yes, I am from the olden times, the dark times… Times of fear and terror, printer not working, having to write things down by hand, ach, the horror… Today much better, says me, yass the foundations of democracy and fabric of society has been eaten away like by millions of worms, teenagers constantly fighting with mental illnesses, lies and disinformation, young strong lads drug or gambling addicts… but, the minor conveniences, my lad! Ach, those I would not live without. The minor conveniences…
When I use a computer to do work I want the computer to be right. I want to be able to trust the computer. With the inherit non-determinism and probabilistic nature of generative-AI, that fundamental reason why I engage a computer is lost.
If the spreadsheet is wrong, it’s because the math is wrong, it’s because I made a mistake. It’s not because all of a sudden the computer decided the nature of algebra should be different than it is.
Part of the reason why humans are rejecting AI is that we are putting it in places where it makes no sense, or places where humans prefer a human in the loop, there are plenty of places where machine learning algorithms make sense, but customer service is not one of them.
This is an interesting way of thinking about it. I generally agree. I especially agree that anti-AI sentiment partially comes from miss-using it. However:
Determinism isn't a requirement for 100% correctness.
A Las Vegas algorithm is randomized, non-deterministic and guarantees 100% correctness [0].
The execution can be different every time but the result will always be correct. determinism does not lose accuracy. It does lose time predictability.
So if your problem with AI is accuracy, then in theory your problem is just premature stopping.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_algorithm
Heavily agree.
The computer should be a force for order, because being a living creature is chaos.
That said LLMs can be used in ways that promote order. People just got excited and wanted to believe they could be trusted in chaos mode.
For reference chaos mode would be prompting something like: "Look at my journal entries and tell me what I should do to fix my life". Versus using one to build a table of common themes and analyzing the resulting spreadsheet yourself.
I think we got excited / wanted to believe that we won't have to expend any effort whatsoever, and the AI could "do it all".
The reality (as far as I can comprehend it) seems to be that AI expanded the scope of what we can shove into one mouthful, and now it takes much more effort to chew. Metaphorically speaking.
Part of the reason coding agents are widely accepted and used is that human coders are chaos, and human coders have spent a lot of time building tooling to ameliorate chaos. Everything from git to language design, to lint, to profilers, etc. was built to keep the human chaos out. It's pretty good at keeping the LLM chaos out, and when it blows up anyway you can roll it back to the previous commit.
I'm not sure I fully agree with this. We can use the computer to build a deterministic system.
People aren't fully deterministic either.
Correctness can also be guaranteed by non-deterministic systems [0]. You do trade time predictability though. It will eventually give the correct answer, we just dont know when.
I keep thinking about the implications of this. So in some sense it's less about being inaccurate and more about prematurely stopping, or not having a well defined target.
In theory if the target is well defined and it never prematurely stops, the question changes from "will the output be correct" to "when will it be done?"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_algorithm
Correct.
Also, the better one gets at using AI, the better they can predict where AI might fail.
This allows you to both work 10x faster and prevent many mistakes, which puts you far ahead of not-using-AI.
Yep. Exactly why we use machines. They do the deterministic bit quickly. We do the other bits.
working with a non deterministic tool requires taste and judgement. if you want full determinism AI is not for you but it has a market for other people?
> there are plenty of places where machine learning algorithms make sense, but customer service is not one of them.
You're optimising for quality, where as companies optimise for some balance of quality and cost.
AI might not be quite as good as a skilled human, but it's often good enough and a lot cheaper, so companies use it.
I actually think customer service is one of the few places it makes sense to use AI – at least to some degree. AI can provide immediate support to customer queries, and can usually handle the majority of basic issues customers have. You might need to escalate to a human in edge cases, but that's how you balance quality and cost.
Reality is non-deterministic (not actually, but in practice). We do strange things to balance this out all the time. Thinking that computer software must be exempt from that mess as a goal is just strange, and concerns itself too much with the ideal of a tool and not enough with the more important question: What if our lives get much, much better? Roughly everyone wants more out of life including the top one percent (and I don't mean the top 0.0001%, just your ordinary industrial nation doctors). How could we possibly morally justify denying everyone the best shot to get at least to that level, and I mean living people RIGHT NOW, ASAP not in a few hundred years? Who would be okay to say "yeah but you know, artists, copyright" and deny those who benefit most from this the opportunity?
How could we not take this shot? I understand perfectly well that a lot of things will need reconfiguration and that it's going to be painful, but dear lord, let's focus on making it go well instead of ending it.
> Thinking that computer software must be exempt from that mess as a goal is just strange
Software is deterministic, it has been since its inception[0]. Why go from something objective/provable to something that does "strange things", when we already have former? It's like making bricks out of paper and declaring "actually, this is logical next step for bricks because stuff waves in the wind".
> What if our lives get much, much better?
What if not?
[0] (Yes not really/actually if we're being pedantic)
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This is completely incoherent. Of course we need deterministic computer programs; much of society depends on it.
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> How could we possibly morally justify denying everyone the best shot to get at least to that level, and I mean living people RIGHT NOW, ASAP not in a few hundred years?
How exactly do you think this is going to happen?
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> Reality is non-deterministic (not actually, but in practice).
At a quantum level, it is also actually non-deterministic.
>What if our lives get much, much better? Roughly everyone wants more out of life including the top one percent (and I don't mean the top 0.0001%, just your ordinary industrial nation doctors). How could we possibly morally justify denying everyone the best shot to get at least to that level, and I mean living people RIGHT NOW, ASAP not in a few hundred years?
This is satire, right?
If you seriously think that AI is going to improve the lives of anyone except the robber barons who own the AI you are absolutely delusional.
Please link to the actual survey instead of this commission outlet, which didn't even link it themselves: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an...
In the survey, 31% Americans believe AI will have an "equally positive and negative impact", and 13% are "not sure"; it's 16% pro 44% N/A 40% anti.
I wish the survey also included non-Americans, because from a 2025 survey (https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-aro...) people from other countries were less concerned; those from Israel and South Korea were more optimistic than pessimistic.
Notably, Pew did this survey 14 months ago and the results were better, but not by much: 17% pro 49% N/A 35% anti. They also did a survey in 2023, and already 50% of US respondents were "more concerned than excited" about AI, while only 10% were "more excited than concerned".
The pushback I see everywhere outside of tech suggests the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest. The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet as much as it likes to think it does.
I think the tech industry is overestimating its value. Because it can code they think it can do anything else, but unlike code a lot of other work can't have a bunch of little bugs and mistakes because you can't open up real life and edit it after the fact. Plus it lacks actual reasoning to solve novel problems.
Hiring an engineer to finetooth comb blueprints for mistakes before construction will take nearly as much time as having an engineer draft them themselves. And they will be smart enough to not do something silly like putting the electrical panel on the back of the shower wall. If you just vibecode some blueprints and start construction without the comb you could lose way more than you saved with something as simple as pouring a support pillar or building a wall 2 inches off and having to tear it out later and rebuild.
The success of AI doesn't hinge on whether you can vibecode it all or even one particular sector really well. For example, despite several attempts to make vibecoding PCBs, it's still pretty crap. But it's really useful as a copilot, human in the loop for targeted tasks in electronics. Same for CAD work, not so good at drawing but still useful at looking at an image, understanding it, and answering specific questions.
Whether the value attached to these companies is grounded in reality is a different question.
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Definitely. The secret will be identifying use cases where AI usage is a potential upside with limited downside, not the current blanket statements about replacing all jobs without considering lifetime ROI. There’s a lot of boring work AI can automate with minimal risk. There’s also the potential to decrease risk with AI too, including ensembles of different AIs modals and AI + human.
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Frontier model companies aren’t banking on the general public “wanting” AI. They are on a path to a product that won’t need to be wanted because the entire economy will need it.
I'd argue the economy is propped up on pointless work providing employment. If you throw AI in that it'll contract and it'll either collapse entirely or move to a social care model that no one will foot and rapid class division. You'll end up with burning or unused datacentres that is all.
Any economic model that I've seen leads to failure. The only reason it's popular now is that numbers are going up. People are just edging it.
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It's more telling of the state of economy right now than AI.
Capital is simply going from bubble to bubble to pop. It was NFTs and Web3, then the metaverse, now it's AI. You need a new speculative product, market demand be damned. Ultimately the tech itself is inconsequential. Sure, AI is somehow more useful than an hashed png picture of a monkey smoking a joint, but the AI frenzy would've happened anyway.
I can imagine some other alternate universe where it's the turn of something already commonplace instead, like cloud computing; and the same CEOs that are screaming right now that we need to burn the ecosystem to build their new AI data centers would've told us that "The Cloud is inevitable", and that we need to spend 80% of the GDP to finance their AWS competitors or whatever.
The product is firing half your workforce. You don't need marketing, that sells itself in the B2B space.
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Well, they hope they are on such a path.
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AI seems more like a feature than a product.
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~~economy~~fascism
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I really think there’s a concerted effort by the media to demonize AI though. Every third story I see on my news feeds is some sensationalist story about how AI/data centers are bad.
The media does have an interest in doing this—writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.
> The media does have an interest in doing this—writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.
Maybe, but it's also pretty clear that the entire purpose and intent of delivering "AI" to the economy is to wholly wipe out labor. Do I think that's realistic? No. SpaceX's total addressable market (TAM) in their S-1 filing to go public stated as much. Their TAM is $28.5T(!) with $26.5T of it being AI. That's larger than the US GDP (~$24T). You can only throw numbers like that around if you're explicitly aiming to replace labor, no matter how realistic it is.
Personally, I'm tired of mediocre people who've attained some amount of business success turning around and trying to dismantle democratic systems because it's incompatible with their world view.
It's more than reasonable to complain about these things night and day. The alternative to vocal complaints won't be pretty.
> writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.
I honestly don't think writers have much of a say regarding what they write. The tone is set top down.
But given that most people hate AI it's a polarizing topic to write about, they have incentives to poor some oil, for sure.
Fine by me, AI is an anti-human technology.
44% of Americans believe AI will have a neutral impact while 40% believe it will have a negative impact. Just to note - about half as many Americans believe AI will have a positive impact as believe in telepathy. Believing AI will have a positive impact is officially a fringe belief.
The media are followers here, not leaders. 84% of people can't agree on the color blue[0]. Don't try to make excuses for a few billionaires finding the limit of their reality distortion field.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4921196/#:~:text=A%...
The media is largely owned by tech billionaires, so why would they be against their own products?
Altman, Amodei, Musk and other tech industry leaders (not to mention technologists like Hinton) are constantly making public statements that predict everything from massive job loss, to restructuring of society to the possibility of an end to our species. The media is taking their cue from the tech industry itself.
> I really think there’s a concerted effort by the media to demonize AI though
That sounds literally insane to me. This is not coming from the media, many of the same people that own the media have a vested interest in this particular US political administration... which is also basically all of big tech.
I'm not even media and I'm demonising it. It's the hubris of the technology industry attempting to destroy society for financial gain only.
You should change the world by playing chess, not creating a new game and shitting on everyone playing the old one.
My only objective is doing damage it to it before it kills our pensions and 401k's etc.
It's to the point where if you drop an AI meme or screenshot of text in chat people will mock you. I don't see that getting better?
Memes have associations, connotations, subtleties in how they're used in different contexts - they're a communication medium. A well applied meme is like (it isn't - but it can be viewed similarly to) poetry where you've matched your idea with an evocative statement to a perfect degree and the subtleties and implications in your head are well and fully transferred to the reader. An AI meme is like a dry technical paper that lays out all of the information in a kludgy unimaginative manner. Good meme based communication relies on a lot of audience understanding and can draw people together as a demonstration of kinship.
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Does it need to?
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Not ever profession has an insatiable desire to automate away their own jobs.
They didn't overestimate the interest. ChatGPT is extremely popular and notable.
>The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet
Of course they don't, but they are still allowed to make a product, and pivot if there's no consumer demand. However there is huge consumer and business demand for AI so they are justified in making the investments they are.
Not quite. They don't operate like that.
It is not ok to lobby and manipulate governments for fiscal policy changes to write off the costs and risks on the general public.
We MUST be entirely insulated from their failure as society. If they can't raise the capital for the product then they should fail quietly and insignificantly which is not what is going to happen at the moment.
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> ChatGPT is extremely popular
Citation needed. Most people use it once a while but not daily; they tried it once and played a bit with it but then forgot about it because it’s not clear what they should use it for.
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There needs to be a brutal humbling
Definitely. That'll have to come through economic instruments though rather than failure.
I have said this before, I just can NOT understand how you can measure adoption of a technology or product without giving people a full opt-out.
This is very basic in technology products.
It is very easy to say that Gmail AI product has 1.8 Billion users because there are about 1.8 Billion Gmail accounts/users and they have absolutely no way of completely opting out. (opting out without the company punishing users by taking away important features)
A simple A/B Test with just 50,000 or 100,000 users depending on the product will give everyone the REAL picture of where users stand.
> the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest.
You should consider that the industry is just lying to make everyone believe that everyone else is interested. Creating a sense of inevitability. It's the same trick that every ad out there uses, selling you a profitable fantasy as reality.
Because the writing is on the wall already. Who hasn't been annoyed with "AI customer service", we already read about AI in the military, then you have the envisioned huge loss of jobs.
People generally seem to like using it as a chatbot, or answer questions, on their own terms. But anywhere it's been forced against the user asking for it has been a disaster.
Very true. I work for an AI company, I use it every day, it's a huge value add for certain problems.
My heat pump died the other day and I called an HVAC place and got an AI agent, which was frustrating and not helpful. So I called a different HVAC place and spoke to someone who could actually help, then I gave them lots of money.
Similarly: was calling apartments to ask about them / schedule a tour before I moved in, rejected the second best option specifically because they only had AI agents on the phone
I had an AI agent lie to me
I called siriusxm to get them to turn off their stupid advertising on my in-car infotainment
I had called like 3 months ago to do the same thing. The human agent confirmed she turned it off on my account
I called again recently and asked the AI to turn off in-car ads and weather alerts. The ai INSISTED this was my car's manufacturer responsibility.
I kept yelling and swearing until it finally transferred me to a human. The human confirmed that it was a part of sirius AND that the feature was disabled (it turns out that disabled features on inactive accounts automatically become re-active on 'free weekends'. Holy fuck that seems illegal. the only way to disable features during free weekends is to have an active account (aka paying them)).
My next car is going to be seriously driven by a lack of connectivity, lack of sirirusxm. I'll buy a car where someone already figured out how to physically remove the radio
It's not envisioned. There have been mass layoffs and a lot has been pinned on AI, even if it's true or not.
It's kind of hilarious, and a pretty obvious externality, most of these layoffs are clearly just restructuring that the companies want an excuse for but by labeling them as modernization and AI driven they've caused a major image problem for AI for the one thing it hasn't actually done much of (outside of really stupid companies - like the ones that fired their whole teams and moved their workforce to India as soon as they heard how cheap the labor was there).
I don't like AI customer service either, but having seen the other side it cuts down huge amounts of inbound queries (where the answer can usually be found in knowledge bases) and provides an answer faster than a human would. As long as the escalation path to talk to a human isn't too arduous it's not too bad.
I think the key issue here is that the people deciding how long the escalation path is isn't the humans (a fair few people do opt into search company FAQs for their answer before dialing a hotline - you're robbing those people in particular of their time by forcing them back through the same FAQ steps and discouraging the usage of those opt-in low cost resources) and, right now, consumer protection and rights are at an all time low so a fair number of AI rollouts have been downright customer malicious.
It absolutely has a place in the system - but that place (in the companies that do it well) starts by giving call center employees access to the AI as a fallback when they don't know an answer and reduces the amount of information and product specialization needed. Assuming it is ranked highly by internal teams then you can consider shifting it from being an internal tool to one exposed externally - instead, in a lot of cases, companies have just switched off the ability to dial in without going through the AI hoops and, in the worst cases, if there's a tech issue where the call center disconnects from the customer, the customer is forced to go through all those hoops again.
I like to emphasize that AI is a tool - it can be applied well in a considered and thoughtful manner - or it can be rolled out to every conceivable usage with reckless abandon... we're in a place where number two is the dominant approach.
The escalation path is always too arduous though, because most people still prefer to talk to a human when they’ve got to the point of opening a chat window. You’ve always got to jump through a bunch of hoops which are basically answering yes when asked whether you’ve tried reading the website.
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I hate the AI customer service, from drive thru to call center AI complete with fake background sounds, I hate it all. As a customer I find it insulting.
I'm thinking it has more to do with the fascism of the oligarchs at this point. These are just thinwrappers over the failure of American democracy.
Source Link - https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an... is a better link.
Does not at all surprise me that people don't think losing their livelihoods would have a positive impact. Maybe AI companies should stop bragging about trying to do that if they're concerned about people hating them.
It's interesting that many developing and Asian countries have a more positive view of AI: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/15/people-around-the-w...
How much of this is due to AI vs. the government and corporate structures in society? (Saw elsewhere that Chinese people were also much more optimistic)
Asian countries have governments that are at least seemingly vested in the interests of their populace. They have significant political and economic safety nets in place that can assure their populations that the government is at least somewhat aligned with the populace.
Instead for many western countries, chiefly The USA, You have a society that very blatantly is restructuring itself to service capital holders and not the population. These Governments are not aligned with their people, and are instead trying to solidify Stratified Economies where the entire engine of the country moves in service of its rich.
If the promise of AI is to provide intellectual labor in exchange for capital, the population loses its only remaining middle class made up of knowledge-workers which still hold a semblance of political power. If the middle collapses like this, the only means of social mobility will become high-risk gambles or crime.
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/01/nx-s1-5807131/tech-worker-chi...
an article on one person? cmon
it seems like Chinese people have much more faith in their govt than Western countries, and subsequently trust them more in distributing the benefits of AI (in aggregate ofc)
I guess I'd say the latter, although I think that fact does not quite have the valence that Western critics might assume. Vietnam, one of the most AI-positive countries in this poll, is explicitly planning (https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/commun...) to use AI to suppress dissent and achieve permanent authoritarian control of the Vietnamese information ecosystem. I think they might be right that it'll work!
probably because none of these polls can be trusted or accurate representation
but we trust the stat that 16 pct of americans have a positive view?
> Despite all of the skepticism, a whole lot of Americans also report using AI in their daily lives on an increasingly regular basis. About a quarter of Americans say they use AI chatbots on a daily basis. Those who do are typically using the chatbots for research purposes or for work, Pew says.
Yeah, we don't have a choice. These things were foisted upon us, and now we all just have to deal with it, so long as we want to keep being employed/employable.
Exactly, there is no full opt-out in any product people use daily.
Yes, "use this or be fired" tends to have an impact. A friend once made a analogy to opium: Sure, it's supposed to be addictive, but if you say no anyways, we're going to show up with gunboats.
AI epitomises chasing a narrow definition of progress that benefits the few (increasing profits via automation) over a holistic definition of progress that benefits the many (reducing poverty, improving health, providing meaning). It's no wonder people hate it.
Not surprising and well deserved: our industry has done a remarkably poor job at balancing public and shareholder interests. Of course that isn’t the _only_ industry in this situation, but its deep intricacies into personal lives and psyches has made it particularly bad.
The boss of the main private TV channel in France famously said in 90s that his job consisted in “selling brain time to advertisers”. What was handicraft has been turned into a mass extraction business by the Google and Facebook of our world. AI is the cherry on the cake, really.
Surprisingly high number given that people are being told by tech CEO that AI will replace all white collar jobs soon and a few years later AI guided robots will replace all blue collar jobs too.
It is to America’s great fortune that her technological innovations are not passed by committee. In particular, polls always capture the status quo. Other things that were widely unpopular: interracial marriage, gay marriage. And especially for technology, public opinion led to the stalling of fission power in the US.
So hurray for ignoring the majority of people. I’m glad people can offer other people services in a generally neutral way without needing to pass a committee.
Interracial and gay marriage were not "wildly unpopular" "technological innovations". What an extraordinary stretch to try to tie the in-fact deeply unpopular, job-destroying and wealth-concentrating AI boom to human--HUMAN--rights victories.
Stubbing my toe fucking sucks, but perhaps the fact that I think it sucks is actually evidence that it is secretly a good thing!
Everyone is going to dislike this comment because you're cutting across two different polarized groups and comment sections rarely champion the middle ground.
Everyone is going to dislike because the opinion is moronic, frankly. Should we compare emancipation of slaves to a toaster next?
Also because it’s factually false, and it’s doubtful to compare human rights and AI.
Throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not think the Apollo moon missions were worth the cost.
Slavery is currently wildly unpopular in the US. Does that mean that the public is therefore wrong and slavery will be making a comeback soon?
Polls like these always remimnd me that I need set up a investing strategy that does the opposite of public sentiment.
Amusingly, I actually tried something like this using /r/wallstreetbets and there was no signal I could extract on a sufficiently small scale. Far dominated by Trump antics and rate actions. Perhaps others will have better luck.
This is definitely a take.
This is an insane take.
Also wrong, gay marriage had 60% support before Obergefell v. Hodges.
I am mixed on the question.
Claude has been quite helpful in reviewing my investments, and I have made a fair amount of money on his advice. His availability is unparalleled compared to any sort of financial planner.
Professionally, I have run my programs and scripts through Copilot/OpenAI and sometimes received caustic and fiery criticism, but others praise with helpful suggestions. Oftentimes it does make fundamental mistakes.
The threats of the end of the white collar class are not unduely worrying to me, as my retirement is close. Still, the whole of the culture is begin driven neurotic.
My answers to this question are personal, and atypical. Perhaps there will be general good in this somewhere, though it may be hard to see.
> Claude has been quite helpful in reviewing my investments, and I have made a fair amount of money on his advice. His availability is unparalleled compared to any sort of financial planner.
Just out of curiosity, what are some investment moves that you made as a result of Claude's advice?
"In a bull market, everyone's a genius."
I believe the current pessimistic atmosphere has very little to do with AI.
Sure, only 16% of Americans think AI will have a positive impact. But if you ask if they believe smart phone, social media, metaverse, crypto, etc will have a positive impact I highly doubt you'll get a much bigger number.
> Pew writes that 44 percent of U.S. adults now say they use OpenAI’s chatbot, a figure that’s more than doubled since 2023.
> The next most popular chatbot is Gemini (24 percent), followed by Copilot (17 percent) and MetaAI (14 percent), with Grok (8 percent), Claude (6 percent) and Character.ai (3 percent) lagging behind.
Claude in 6th place, behind Gemini and Copilot and MetaAI and Grok?
No wonder the general public still think AI is junk.
Update: here's the underlying report: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an...
The question there was "% of U.S. adults who say they ever use the following AI chatbots", so it's not a measure of overall usage, just exposure. Not surprising Gemini and Grok and MetaAI rank higher then.
I think there is a valid point here that Anthropic has a found a great product-market fit among programmers.
By comparison, all the rest of the tools non-programmers get exposure to are floundering around trying to be everything to everyone. It's a push not a pull.
The rest of the pack, when given everyday real-world computing tasks, for people that don't know what a terminal is, just suck. (e.g. "copilot, fix the spacing issue in this word document" or literally any apple genmoji attempt with more than two basic english words)
I had a big culture shock moment when I had to prep some slides a few weeks back. I'd assumed it would be a breeze now: I've always been good at making slide decks, I had a clear classification-friendly idea of exactly what I wanted them to look like, and there's even an AI native integration! Nope, didn't work, just had to shuffle components around like I always have.
Yeah, I'm sure the public will totally 180 on AI as soon as the newest model release rolls out lmfao
Is Claude really that much better than all the others for normal use?
Yes. There’s not really any doubt about it.
It's not that Claude is better, it's that Gemini and Copilot are so overwhelmingly bad.
My observation of society is that, by default, people tend to have a belief system of "most tech that existed before I was born was fine; any new tech is bad/unnecessary".
So it doesn't surprise me that people are predisposed to not like this particular new tech.
The promoters of AI themselves seem pretty convinced of the negative impact to society. It seems to even be part of the marketing.
There’s very clearly a Substack of putting everyone out of work, reducing the power of labor, so a few can profit.
It'd be interesting to see how many people thought cars would have a positive impact on society back in the day.
Cars are not something that didn’t exist and then was suddendly invented; it has slowly evolved over centuries.
imo the negative sentiment is less a practical response to AI specifically, and more an emotional response to digital technology in general.
Eg: i think my kids will likely be more comfortable, have more convenience, than me — but i worry a lot they will be more anxious and lonely.
I don’t personally believe this gets solved through regulation, religion, or self-discipline.
imo we just need technology products that drastically reduce the cost of things that make us less anxious and lonely
Unless you’re in the top 5-10% of American society, it’s unclear that your kids will be more comfortable than you. Data here:
https://economicprinciples.org/Why-and-How-Capitalism-Needs-...
At the core, this is what the pessimism is about. If AI replicates the advent of personal computers and the Internet, our society will look more like India where everyone has technology but only 5-10% of people live really well
It's weird. For me the problem stems from how society uses AI, not from AI itself. I personally had totally positive experiences in my job but seeing people using ChatGPT like some magic truth machien is scary.
Without corporations and trillionaires involved would they think differently perhaps?
I don't think it's AI. I think it's the apathetic voterbase finally waking up to just how much tax dodging is going on.
The biggest threat isn't the bomb, bioweapon or AI supremacy. The true threat is AI's impact on human learning and development.
Well, everywhere AI is being sold in a way to replace humans. Humans don't want to think about having to use a product at work that is genuinely aimed at actually replacing their job.
AI is still a tool for complex tasks. Reaching impactful everyday use for regular users will take time. It is not clear who they interviewed for this study. It would be good to see how people in specific industries feel about AI.
They are all on this forum!
Also relevant: Ten Percent Of U.S. High School Students Graduating Without Basic Object Permanence Skills - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssjokgx0pUQ
An instantaneous measure of a sentiment undergoing an exponential decay I sense
Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an...
The one and only product for AI is labor displacement and wage suppression. That's why companies love it. That's why people hate it. We don't live in a society where the benefits will be shared. We live in a society that would rather let people die in the streets than potentially hurt shareholder value.
We are bouldering towards the total collapse of society. To me, it's like 10,000 people want to rule the post-apocalyptic world (Fallout style) where asking "maybe we shouldn't have the apocalypse?" is heresy.
the AI bros would counterargue and say that with all the increased productivity, it will just open up more opportunities and thus more jobs. But, i don't think we're seeing that. Net jobs seems to be going down.
This number will go up in maybe ... 10 years?
That's what I am thinking. Things are moving fast so from the inside the tech bubble it seems that everyone wants to use AI. That is not true for most people.
> Things are moving fast so from the inside the tech bubble it seems that everyone wants to use AI.
Is it really 'want', or is it FOMO?
Replace 'AI' with any other technology. Imagine if only 16% of people thought that the invention of the wheel or soap would have a positive impact.
The overall greater good of humanity matters more than anything else.
I think one positive thing that might come of this is for AI to act as a sort of counterweight to the fragmentation of reality into different filter bubbles.
It might be difficult to make models that have useful, high intelligence, but also are very biased. It could create a sort of grounding in logic and reality.
Grok might actually be early evidence of this. Despite the bad press it gets, it's really not so bad.
One can always hope ...
Will AI have a positive impact on society in China?
It's a shame, as AI will improve healthcare on an unprecedented scale.
I cannot get a specialist without referrals and endless appointments to spend more than 30min to discuss how to fix a serious issues. Claude? Hours and hours of back and forth. Public models now beat the specialized ones like OpenEvidence. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04431-5
Diagnostics is getting blown apart by AI, the best cancer screening will be available in even remote corners of this world.
We were constrained by the available brain mass of highly trained specialists - and this bottleneck is getting removed.
Hard not to be optimistic on AI if you're in healthcare.
I think views on AI are not really views on AI, they are views on capitalism. People don't feel optimistic that AI's impact will benefit ordinary people because, even if works out, the benefit will accrue only to capital owners. This view feels pretty understandable to me, but is ultimately orthogonal to whether AI is useful and effective for the kind of tasks we want to leverage it for.
This is an accurate take. From a tech perspective, AI and ML are great. It's a neat and successful experiment that has a lot to offer.
The fact it's being pushed on all of us as this panacea for the cost of human effort is just disgusting, even if the technology is truly impressive.
Every company salivated at the thought of using AI to enrich themselves, but not a single thought seems to have been given to the human element of it all.
The empirical data doesn’t support this view.
Capitalism approval rates in the US is much more favorable than 16%.
That makes sense, but I would love to see the data on it. I don't doubt at all that capitalism in isolation is viewed more favourably in the US, but that doesn't preclude the intersection of AI and capitalism being viewed less favourably.
I suppose my comment should've said "views on AI aren't solely views on AI, they are views on AI as it intersects with capitalism"
That's part of it, but views on AI are also views on art and authenticity. I'm a huge fan of AI for coding, research and writing for work. When I see AI generated images, music or anything else "creative" my reaction has grown to be pretty negative. It's all got NFT vibes aesthetically.
I was absolutely blown away by Stable Diffusion and that AI could generate images, now I'm kind of disgusted with it. We've been flooded with low artistic value output and people are having a natural reaction to that.
AI will be the most important thing to happen to art. We have tolerated low quality art for far too long because we pretend mechanical dexterity is what makes art, art. Art is not valuable because of this. AI removes the part I never cared about. I never cared that a guitarist can physically play 1500 notes a second.
Agree. I actually think we'll see a resurgence in art and graphic design as a consequence. At least for now people can spot AI generated artifacts and many immediately have a negative reaction to it. I don't read blog posts that feature AI generated images, even though they are only slightly worse than stuff cribbed form Unsplash.
The thing is the vast majority has never given a shit about authenticity though. All of the top pop stars are performing music made by committees and designed by marketing teams. Most music sold is and has been lowest common denominator trash since TV was invented. It's hilarious to see some Katy Perry fan frothing at the mouth about AI not being authentic art. As if they ever cared. Most mainstream entertainment is designed to placate and distract. And I'm not even saying mainstream is bad, there's nothing wrong with catchy. It's the crocodile tears over authenticity that bothers me.
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I think there are some gems in the media space, the Lord Of The Rings Disco song is a certified banger, AI or not.
But yes, there is so so much slop as well
The public is always against new technology that makes jobs obsolete.
This is awkward because the immense progress of the last 250 years has mostly come from such technology. Yet few people are aware of this.
I hope we can continue to progress by eliminating jobs, but the current backlash is probably the biggest I've seen in my life.
AI has uses. But actually using it is analogous to setting your neighbor's house on fire so that you can roast marshmallows.
Marshmallows are pretty tasty, I guess.
Tech companies have basically just milked advertising dollars from trad media, and centralized malls into websites.
Now we have dystopian warehouses and cars driving all over.
We get more, but we do less.
We interact with more of the world, but we interact with people less.
It makes us unhappy.
Must be missing some zeroes. There's no way that AI techbros and major shareholders are 16% of the US. Must be more like .0016%.
Not everyone who likes something that you don't like is an X-bro, so maybe that clears things up.
I think that the smartphone is the single worst thing to happen, not so much AI. AI will hopefully help deal with reckless people typing in their smartphones while driving etc.
Make no mistake: I am as much perpetrator as victim. While I am having even days off of my smartphone and never use it during driving, I am at least as much affected and addicted as most of us.
It's the people not technology. Way back before AI was the hot issue, Eric Schmidt said a new bar for being tone deaf by going straight for saying privacy is dead get over it. Not "here are some tools to retain some privacy," not "here is some legislation to punish privacy violations," just get over it.
It's gotten worse from there. The "dark enlightenment." Flirting with fascism. Creating the biggest meme stocks in history and promoting that as accomplishment. You're not fooling enough people. We might not be in your face about it, but we know you're not good people.
And a foolish 16 % at that
Most of what AI is visibly used for is very unwelcome for American consumers: spam, propaganda, bad art, bad memes, marketing calls, bad phone support... Then the future promise is mass unemployment... of course Americans are negative on it. What is the upside for them?
Just a reminder that the baddie isn't technology, but capitalism.
Half of Americans voters elected Trump. Most people are idiots, I wouldn’t use that as a gauge yet.
It's pretty telling that only 16% have a positive view on it, then. If even Trump has more than twice as high approval than your product, you've royally fucked up.
This wildly assumes that "I voted for $candidate" means "I like $candidate." Every presidential election cycle we get served up two turds, one with a (D) and the other with an (R) by their name, and we have to pick which turd we'd like to ruin our country for us the least.
Ah, you must be one of those enlightened centrists that doesn't recognize a shifting overton window even if it grabs you by the....
while I’d say that was true in most elections, this one the choices for the future couldn’t be more stark. The dude just had a UFC on the white house lawn, for instance, and fell into the Iran/Israel trap every previous president had avoided. But yeah, Kamala and Trump are the same level of turdness /s.
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AI is capitalism gone wild.
50% of the S&P 500 valuation is now directly related to AI as are 40% of new layoffs.
A quote often attributed to Stalin/Lenin/Marx is something like, "Capitalists will sell the rope to be used to hang them".
AI is taking this even further. Corps are effectively borrowing tons of money in order to build the rope to hang the middle class --- to be followed by hanging themselves.
The idea that you can lay off the middle class and business will continue as usual is a capitalistic fantasy. Without jobs, people can't afford to buy products built with AI.
Citations, please
Just ask AI --- "What percentage of S&P 500 market cap is AI related?".
AI wouldn't lie to you --- would it?
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People don’t even know what it is, they think it’s chat bots. Useless statistic.
In the meantime, AI has given scientists 20 years of incredible tools, from which we now reap the fruits in our daily lives
it’s not been useful anywhere else - no self driving cars, no laundry helpers - just some idiotic animatronic carcasses that are barely able to walk around, and semi autonomous killer bots on ukraine frontlines.
No this is just the ones people understand. An AI that folds proteins for you is world altering, it’s just not as sexy as “killer drone”.
The most lucrative uses of deep neural networks today are ad targeting and recommendation algorithms. Those are other places.
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I saw over a dozen self driving cars on my way to work today. Weave Robotics launched a laundry helper months ago, although my sense is that "laundry folding" is a bit of a meme and people don't actually care very much about automating it.
> and semi autonomous killer bots on ukraine frontlines.
They did fully autonomous tests in 2022 through 2024. Something like everything in a 5km radius was dead. Various sources in mainstream media online about this now.
It's hard to balance the downsides (devastating job losses that will affect certain fields) with the upsides (curing diseases, increasing efficiency in ways that will reduce costs of many goods).
Is something a net benefit if everything is cheaper and cancer is cured, but you have no job?
Is something a net benefit if the upsides are hypothetical and the downsides are extant?
This is less insightful than what people might want to read into it. The democratic party has adopted an anti-ai stance as a position in the partisan football game. NPR tote bag carriers read with great concern about AI's terrible water usage (in reality a tiny fraction of that used in things such as lawns), and about the fact that it can do a better job than amateur artists.
On the other side, you don't see a similar upswell in support from the right. AI companies are from San Francisco, and their CEOs are weird, awkward, and probably gay abortion lovers.
Sir, this is a Wendy's.