Comment by ethin
19 hours ago
> it is shaking up and going to shake up a lot of the world.
The problem is that this is only happening because the powerful are forcing it on us. This is exactly why the backlash against it has gotten so big. Had companies not jumped on the AI bandwagon and forced it down veryone's throats (sometimes putting your job on the line if you refused) the backlash probably would be non-existent. The AI boosters/pro-AI people will of course continue to claim that nobody is forcing you to use AI (I literally had this told to me on a different forum like 4 days ago, it was honestly ridiculous how delusional this particular booster was...)
I know lots of people who voluntarily use AI regularly without being forced to - a lot more than either people who are anti-AI or people who are forced to use it for work.
That's probably a function of the people I'm around more than anything else. It is also the case that AI is being pushed on people, sometimes forcefully. But the category of people who use it because they want to is very large.
> The problem is that this is only happening because the powerful are forcing it on us.
Look, I won't deny that like the dot-com bubble and the "cloud" hype of years before that there isn't overhyping and forcing going on. But this feels to me a lot like someone in the mid 90's looking at this "internet" thing and thinking it's all a fad being pushed on us by computer nerds. I'm not saying every company and every attempt to stuff "AI" into everything is going to be some revolution that will stick with us forever, but neither were a lot of early online providers. But like I said, AI is infrastructure, and people are going to figure out how to build things on top of it that will become integrated and standard parts of our lives, just like computers, the internet and the cloud are all today.