6 ms·

The AI backlash is only getting started

98 points by andsoitis 4mo ago

eventinbox 4mo ago
people conflate "AI is overhyped" with "AI is useless" and neither is quite right. the backlash is mostly against the hype cycle not the tech itself. give it 2 years
- simianwords 4mo ago
  This is often repeated but not true. Ed Zitron conflates the two all the time.
- throwfaraway135 4mo ago
  AI is already too useful to discard, we could automate 90% bureaucracy and government jobs and no one would feel the difference. But of course fear/angst/rage sells.
  - shimman 4mo ago
    AI is so useful they have to subsidize it with trillions of dollars while having no near term profit. AI is so useful that you have to threaten workers in order for them to use the tools. I'm sorry but all of this is to be determined but if the present is any indicator LLMs tend to make things distinctly worse, not better. Any areas of "potential" still rely on massive amounts of manual human labor, hardly a trillion dollar industry. "Useful" in the sense of cheap parlor tricks, useful in the real sense that it enables mass surveillance on the cheap; but actually useless for the material lives of people around the world. I'm sure it's great if you're a rich tech bro.
    - pixl97 4mo ago
      Conflating useful and profitable is a strawman you've created yourself. There are plenty of issues with AI but that's a weird hill to stand on.
      - customguy 4mo ago
        Whereas randomly ranting against "bureaucracy", in light of DOGE and Epstein emails (elite = morons) and what Thiel and the Palantir CEO are on about, is totally normal, isn't projection at all, and talking about "rage" isn't a strawman either. No, that requires a serious rebuttal, being a serious argument and all.
    - hatefulheart 4mo ago
      Indeed it is so self evidently useful that you have to discover the correct way to use it.
    - adamddev1 4mo ago
      I made one language learning app with a top end LLM backend and at first I thought it was magic. But as I and other people used it more I realized: - This thing is very consistently lying and misleading people. Do I want to introduce more deception and confusion into the world? - people don't actually want to use this. - I don't actually want to use this. - Something about this feels wrong. I dropped it. I have another couple of big language learning projects made with 100% human blood sweat and tears, long projects over many years. Zero LLMs or voice models used for anything. Those continue to grow and are loved, and I feel great about them.
    - programmarchy 4mo ago
      Railroads had enormous subsidies, too. This is how infrastructure is built, even in "capitalist" economies because it operates at the level of national security. Even to this day, passenger rail is not profitable, although freight is very profitable. So it wouldn't be surprising if "passenger" AI remains unprofitable, while "freight" AI becomes very profitable. Pretty bold statement to say it's useless for most people outside of tech. Almost every "normal" person I know including my in-laws are using it regularly. It's becoming the go-to for asking questions rather than Google, Bing, etc. And the privacy battle was lost 25 years ago. People don't really care if corporations know about their search history (Google), or their private lives (Facebook). You're beating a dead horse there.
      - shimman 4mo ago
        I like your analogy on railroads because it leads us to the point that these tech companies should honestly be nationalized at this point as they are a danger to the country writ large.
  - dippogriff 4mo ago
    They tried that a few times and the mistakes have had consequences.
  - dickiedyce 4mo ago
    "...and no one would feel the difference" does speak to the inadequcy of bureaucracy and government execution. Maybe we wouldn't notice the difference with our interactions with bureaucracy and government, but fairly certain we'd notice the jobs market being flooded with Golgafrincham's cast-offs.
    - customguy 4mo ago
      > "...and no one would feel the difference" does speak to the inadequcy of bureaucracy and government execution. Well, the attempt to claim that speaks to something, but the claim doesn't really, because it's not true. Let's not even try to get people to think about people who are not them, people who are in need, people with disabled children, whatever. I don't know about the US because it has very few spaces where people actually live together like humans would, but for the majority of the world, at least in major cities: nevermind healthcare or pensions and whatnot, just consider garbage disposal, and maintenance of plumbing and sewer system, the electric grid, and lots of other "small" things like that. The shit we take for granted and corporations moan about because it cuts into their profits and reduces the costs they can externalize slightly. Regulations that say they can't just put saw dust and some heroin in food, that type of thing. That came to be because that's the type of shit they just could not stop doing. If you could quicksave and experience that just for yourself, without fucking life up really badly for everyone else and for decades, you totally should. I don't think most people who talk this stuff from myopic bubbles would last even a week. Because they don't think so well, we know this from the arguments, and are not likeable, we know this from how they don't consider other people. So to me that's absolute bottom of the food chain energy talking about the Ark B. Pure, pristine, unadulterated projection.
  - adamddev1 4mo ago
    People absolutely would feel the difference if AI models started making 90% of the decisions. You were just denied an application because some LLM decided you fit a certain statistical pattern. Where did the LLM go wrong? What were the steps taken to make that decision? Who can you appeal to? Nobody. AI bureaucracy would just keep chugging along, making decisions based on prejudices and patterns it finds but doesn't feel. Rainer Mühlhoff makes some compelling arguments in trying to warn people of the dangers of an AI bureaucracy/state.
    - treis 4mo ago
      What do you think the government is like today? At least with LLMs you'd get your incorrect answer quickly and cheaply.
      - adamddev1 4mo ago
        Human incompetence, or human-written algorithmic incompetence in code can still be identified, appealed to, and dealt with. With LLMs you get incompetence cut off from human embodiment and any chance of empathy, baked into opaque black-boxes, and automated and scaled. We should be arriving to build things that are correct, not saying "stuff sucks already, let's make more stuff that sucks."
        treis 4mo ago
        There are theoretically appeals but for the most part they're illusionary. The original decision is given a lot of deference and the appeal is almost always denied. Plus it's gated beyond a lot of time and money. In adversarial proceedings that's a weapon for one side or the other.
  - marcuskaz 4mo ago
    The US government employees around 3m people, I'm pretty sure 2.7m people losing their jobs would feel the difference.
  - hvbcvbxcvbcvbx 4mo ago
    Why would you start with literally the only thing keeping you alive? Automate corporate bullshit. Keep your hands off the government. They are literally the only ones incentivized to not use you as toilet paper.
  - strken 4mo ago
    I'm starting to think that when non-experts believe a job will be easy to automate with AI, it usually has hidden elements which they don't understand and which make automating it almost impossible. Meanwhile, there are all these intellectual jobs which are hard for humans to do, so we assume they're just hard in general. Look closer, though, and many don't involve human social interaction, only require a small amount of good taste, and don't have any physical component.
  - fabianholzer 4mo ago
    The reason for the existence of bloated bureaucracy is political will not the technical inability to automate processes before the advent of the current wave of AI.
  - rvz 4mo ago
    > we could automate 90% bureaucracy and government jobs and no one would feel the difference. This is really naïve in the long run, since you ultimately cannot solve social problems with technical solutions. It's always techies that fail to realize the second / third and forth order of events when this level of disruption is measured by the number of mass layoffs you can do in each quarter.
  - spaqin 4mo ago
    Still haven't seen anything we weren't able to do before. Faster maybe, but still rehashing everything humanity has achieved.
- therobots927 4mo ago
  I think a lot of it is actually the tech for a lot of reasons: 0. No one wants a datacenter in their backyard or hooked up to the grid while the electricity burden is carried by households. People are afraid of losing their property values and being unable to move away if a DC is built nearby - effectively being trapped there. People in Memphis are breathing in gas fumes from the XAI datacenter there. There are concerns about corrosion byproducts making its way into the aquifers from DC waste water. If DC construction takes the cheap option no sound insulation is installed and people can’t sleep and some even lose their hearing: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-28/living-in-hell-data-center-neighbors-grapple-with-noise-air-pollution https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2... People are pissed that towns and cities are bypassing public approval to placate corporate builders. 1. People have been told to fear for their jobs 2. Many people believe labs have stolen vast amounts of intellectual property 3. Engineers are being pressured to use AI and told they “aren’t prompting right” if/when it doesn’t work for their use case I can go on. But I actually think the majority of the backlash has nothing to do with stock valuations.
  - sanderjd 4mo ago
    I don't think this article is about the backlash among software engineers, but rather society at large. What's going on among software engineers is interesting, but I think it's a different thing, not a microcosm of the mainstream backlash.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - therobots927 4mo ago
      Ok thanks for the nitpick bud. It’s the last item in a priority first list but go off dude
  - cryptopian 4mo ago
    > But I actually think the majority of the backlash has nothing to do with stock valuations. I think it exacerbates the points you make. "You mean, you want to take all the IP, immediately force the tech on us, maybe make my job redundant, and you want billions in funding for it!?"
- frankie_t 4mo ago
  I think AI backlash has less to do with the tech itself and more with its broader impact on society in the current system, if it delivers a quarter of its promises. Those doing the backlashing feel that they are going to lose much more than they are going to gain.
  - doctorwho42 4mo ago
    If it delivers a quarter of its promises, we enter the likes of the great depression. But instead of everyone feeling the squeeze, you will have literal breakdowns in society because our media-corps have been using the social lives of the wealthy as a distraction for so long... "Let them eat cake...", I wonder what the 'taken out of context' trigger will be this time around
  - davidpapermill 4mo ago
    AI also has the misfortune of coinciding with a very difficult period for young people, including limited job opportunities: the financial crash, COVID, Brexit, the political polarisation in the western world. In some sense it's probably acting as a lightning rod for resentment, and that resentment is combined with marketing spiel from the model companies alongside well-placed concern over the impact of AI on employment.
  - leoedin 4mo ago
    I've spoken to a lot of people outside of software development who feel this way. It's mainly a sense of "what is this for?". It's obvious that the presence of AI means everyone has to use it, but it isn't obvious yet exactly what good it will bring to most people. Certainly in my own life it's made some things easier. But that just means I move on to the next thing quicker - the treadmill never stops. Does AI improve my life yet? I'm not so certain. It also has huge environmental costs, pushes up energy prices, pushes up computing hardware prices and sucks attention away from other things. Is it cool? Yes. Is it likely to be society changing. Yes. Does it make anyone's lives better? TBC.
- mritchie712 4mo ago
  There's another "they took our jobs" group that doesn't fit into "AI is overhyped" or "AI is useless". They see that AI is capable and fear it.
  - dgellow 4mo ago
    They see the leadership reaction to what AI is capable of and fear it.
- jerf 4mo ago
  We software engineers have a different experience with AI than most other fields. We have vast arrays of guardrails in our field, with unit testing, CI/CD, source control being relatively easy since we mostly produce textual artifacts, strong typing, compilers with decades of experience in giving targeted error messages, all sorts of things [1]. When AI takes two steps forward and then does something stupid, we have so many guardrails that our harnesses can easily get the error message, feed it back in, and the AI can pick up the pieces and carry on. We hardly even notice this process. If you watch an AI and dig into the details of everything it is doing, you can see it repeatedly banging into these guard rails. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily. As a human being, I bang into those guard rails all the time too. That's where they came from in the first place, to let humans bang into them. And we've built a lot of them. However, in a lot of the rest of the world their experience with AI much more resembles that of the more critical voices that post here. A lawyer who uses an AI that makes two correct citations and then an incorrect one has many fewer automated guard rails to work with. It is relatively easy to imagine a system that at least verifies the citation exists (I've heard that's easier said than done due to the system depending on humans to resolve sloppy references but still it's feasible), but the task of deciding if the AI correctly used the citation, either in the abstract sense of it being correct or in the sense of it being the best way to use it to advance the current case, is a vastly harder decision than "ah, that change failed to compile, try again". Accounting seems like another good example. Yes, it has the obvious guard rail of "do the books balance", but that's the beginning of accounting, not the end. It's difficult to put up guard rails for how the accounting is done from there. An accountant will experience an AI accountant as doing OK sometimes but making really dumb decisions that couldn't be caught by anything other than human review, and I have to imagine that the lack of learning and the way the AI will tend to make the same mistakes over and over must be incredibly aggravating. I think there's probably more truth to "AI is useless" than we may see. I think a lot more people than we realize have had the experience of using AI a while, putting some trust in it, then having that trust grotesquely violated when it says something stupid in an email or makes boneheaded errors in a spreadsheet. We're maybe just now exiting the portion of the hype cycle where it is simply culturally unacceptable to criticize the AI and entering the part where it is culturally both acceptable and expected, and we software engineers may look on in bafflement at the other fields and their complaints because it's working for us, what's your problem? [1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/programming_is_engineering/ https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/programming_is_engineering/
- jcgrillo 4mo ago
  OK but I already gave it 2yrs. How many 2yr grace periods do they get before it becomes clear they're simply lying? It really doesn't help to have stuff like this in print: > a technology that could power a surge in productivity and incomes, help find cures for untreatable diseases and improve everything from education to green tech. They just take these claims completely uncritically and move on. Where is the productivity increase? Where are the cured diseases? Where are the improvements in education and green tech? So far, it's all a big fat zero. Maybe in 2yrs some of this will actually be true? Is that the hope? This is scammer shit. If any of this was true you wouldn't have to ask for extra time. EDIT: The fact we're all calling this "AI" is part of the problem. It's not AI yet, it's still ML. The Overton red-shift comes for us all in the end.
- __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
  Agreed. We've been working on or with AI for 70 years. What's new is that the billionaires recently started drooling over it.
- jasperry 4mo ago
  The proper backlash should be not about its capability level but how it's being used. AI is being adopted to deploy mass surveillance on an unprecedented scale, and to make decisions that affect people's lives without being evaluated by a human first. Those seem worthy of lashing back against.
suzukivenom 4mo ago
can someone paste the not-paywalled link please
leokeba 4mo ago
https://archive.is/A1bE8 https://archive.is/A1bE8
josefritzishere 4mo ago
Frankly, most AI is pretty meh, really only impressing AI enthusiasts, with their near religious fervor. There's a big delta there between power users and everyone else. It writes bad emails, messy code, incorrect metrics, dubious slide decks, ugly graphics... the consumer rejection of AI is only growing. At the same time, the product itself is sold wildly below cost. So it needs to be increase in price at the same time users are rejecting it. This is only ending with a huge market correction.
- cryo32 4mo ago
  That’s roughly it. I don’t really have a use for it myself that I can’t solve some other way cheaper or easier without the damage and uncertainty it does. I’m not really that impressed.
- adamddev1 4mo ago
  It seems by definition "below par" of whatever human activity it's training on. How can we achieve greater and greater heights of intelligence if we're just creeping closer and closer to a sub-par copy of human creative activity.
  - orangecat 4mo ago
    It seems by definition "below par" of whatever human activity it's training on How many sub-par mathematicians could solve the unit distance conjecture?
- playorizaya 4mo ago
  [flagged]
- phantompeace 4mo ago
  How do you know it's being served at wildly below cost? AFAIK API pricing across the board is actually higher than what inference would cost? Yes there are subscription plans that subsidise tokens but they exist primarily to hook people in, so as to encourage their workplace to adopt it, whereby they then have to pay for an enterprise plan with zero subsidies like the subscription plans have. Training is very expensive, but you only do that once. I predict costs will fall.
vitorfblima 4mo ago
The untold promise of IA is to replace labor. That's probably the only reason why some people are willing to spend trillions of dollars in pursuing this technology. Mere tools would never justify this kind of investment. It's no surprise that people are getting angry, even though many are using AI in their everyday life.
- gruez 4mo ago
  >The untold promise of [tractors] is to replace labor. [...] Mere tools would never justify this kind of investment. How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today.
  - vitorfblima 4mo ago
    We're talking about ALL labor.
    - gruez 4mo ago
      Do you think the average dirt farmer in the 1800 is going to be assuaged by the prospect of almost all farm work being mechanized, because he can be a "medical and health services manager" or "data scientist" instead? https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm
      - dofm 4mo ago
        What's a dirt farmer?
        vitorfblima 4mo ago
        You guessed it.
        alamortsubite 4mo ago
        As opposed to a moisture farmer, presumably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aran_Islands#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aran_Islands#History If you're never seen Man of Aran, you're in for a treat! Far more thought provoking than the fluff Lucas made, but by which I always assumed his fictional homestead on Tatooine was inspired.
dippogriff 4mo ago
If the labs weren't so aggressive with building datacenters in people's backyards, this could've been a different story. People don't like it when pipelines are built in their backyard either.
- gruez 4mo ago
  From TFA: >The buildings summon a vitriol well beyond conventional nimbyism. More Americans say they would be happy with a nuclear reactor next door than a data centre. Even plans to build one in the Utah desert have met with passionate opposition.
  - BeetleB 4mo ago
    BTW, the anti-data center movement predates LLMs by a margin. Near where I live the locals were upset before COVID - they employ very few people, use a lot of land, and pay little to no taxes. It's just that they're building them at such a large scale now that you see more and more people protesting them.
- baron816 4mo ago
  Are they built in people’s backyards? There’s a famous case in Northern Virginia that has admitted they messed up zoning which gets cited in every story to make it look like they’re all built in people’s backyards, but the vast majority of them are in industrial zones.
  - BeetleB 4mo ago
    For a lot of folks (including near where I live), "building in my small city" is the same as "backyard". The narrative is "Use up a lot of land, pay almost no taxes, and employ almost no people."
    - rescripting 4mo ago
      Don't forget "drive up utility prices" and barring that, "pollute the air with gas generators".
supermaurio2000 4mo ago
the most stupid article i've read in the economist
- randusername 4mo ago
  TFA gave me brain freeze. > Third, measure everything. The common view that AI is already leading to lay-offs and raising electricity bills is probably wrong. But without better statistics it is hard to be sure. Why are they syndicating high school economics papers on AI?
layer8 4mo ago
Despite the headline, the article is largely AI-positive. > To that end, here are four pointers for politicians and AI companies looking for policies. Extrapolating from the past, none of these are particularly likely to happen, however. Another notable aspect is that, unlike many other societal issues, the backlash against AI is decidedly bipartisan.
dwa3592 4mo ago
People have been made to believe by very influential people (dario, sam, elon etc) that AI will replace them. As a result people are getting angry. Who did not see this coming? Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? There is nothing sexy about it. There is nothing cool about it either. Imagine a taxi driver facing his family knowing he will be replaced by a machine fully; imagine that taxi driver thinking that there are slick graduates from top schools who wake up everyday (waymo, tesla, zoox) with one goal in mind - let's automate this taxi driver. The anger against AI/Tech is just starting really.
- estearum 4mo ago
  Just because people are angry does not make it false. > Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? Because arms race. Game dynamics and incentive structures don't cease to exist just because someone notices them.
  - dweinus 4mo ago
    All those devs and data scientists and PhDs make a choice though. They could quit and work somewhere else. Even in a tough market their skills are in demand. They choose to work on this every morning.
    - BeetleB 4mo ago
      Sure, they could do that. The outcome wouldn't change, though. If SW devs who worked on ride sharing apps didn't leave, why would you think these folks would? If SW devs who worked on airline ticket search engines didn't leave, why would you think these folks would? And on and on and on. The SW industry has been heavily involved in replacing jobs since its inception.
      - smaudet 4mo ago
        > The SW industry Partly the issue is, it was never the right model. If you write/wrote code, you were a manager. Probably a better one than your "people manager" ever was, but that is/was arguably a different skill. What you managed was extremely technical, more akin to a line manager or an operations manager than a people manager. Which, yes, everyone could not be the manager. Everyone who was not the manager could be quality control (QC), and handle the parts that "only a human" could handle. The problem is, AI fits in nowhere in this equation, rather it throws it out. AI can manage, like any manager it can short circuit it's QC, in pursuit of an arbitrary metric. Even the idea of "human in the loop" is fundamentally flawed - if the human is not at some level the one directing (managing), there is no reason to stop incuding the human, less and less, in the work. AI is not useful to us.
Maledictus 4mo ago
https://archive.is/A1bE8 https://archive.is/A1bE8
pelotron 4mo ago
"AI promises to change the world for the better" - so far it's clear the world will be better for a few people. A promise that it will be better for everyone reads like "trust me, bro." "Blockers need to be shown that their local area will benefit if they get out of the way." Benefit how? Will this be like when your city convinces you it's in everyone's interest to subsidize the latest billionaire-owned sports stadium? "If America succumbs [to popular rage], it could cede the global ai frontier" ah here we go. The next generation of Too Big To Fail.
adrians1 4mo ago
Remember the debate about how nuclear was stopped in the 70s because of NIMBYism? We are now wondering "how could people then be so stupid and shortsighted?". Well, there you go, here's history repeating before our eyes.
- estearum 4mo ago
  Not really. Nuclear power (in both the weapon and energy sense) is and always was relatively easy to manage compared to AI. If the deployment of nuclear energy required the distribution of radioactive material to every smartphone in America and for unstable isotopes to be plugged into the core operating infrastructure of every industry, then they'd be a lot closer to analogous.
  - adrians1 4mo ago
    Of course. Those people back then were stupid and irrational and couldn't see they were wrong. Today we are much more enlightened and smart, and our convoluted arguments, that sound very smart and somehow reach the same conclusion that the technology must be stopped, are totally right. We're not opposed to AI due to irrational fear and NIMBYism, like those simpletons before.
    - estearum 4mo ago
      Excellent work responding to the argument put in front of you! You are so rational!
      - adrians1 4mo ago
        We're not much better than our ancestors. We'd like to think we are, because we're much more intelligent and have access to more information. But we really aren't. We're still driven by irrational sentiments and fears. We hate AI because it's new and feels icky, and will bring change and we don't like change. We would prefer the 2020s to be frozen in time forever and ever (although we're more than happy to benefit from progress that happened before our time, which upended the lives of other people long dead). So that's it, there's no argument. The only argument is "I hate AI because fuck it", which is much more sincere. I don't need to hear about water or electricity or cognitive decline or any other made up stuff that sounds intellectual.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
xvxvx 4mo ago
The best scenario for AI companies is that they replace the human workforce with their bots and make all the money. It’s a sick, amplified version of outsourced labor. I’ve been rereading Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of The United States’ and the US has been doing this since day zero. Build the economy on indentured servitude. Replace that with slavery. Flood cities with freed slaves when wages get too high. Flood the country with illegals for the same reason. Offshore the work to poor countries. Automate as much as possible. Now AI. Kudos to the AI leaders for the carefully manicured publicity, claiming this will make everyone free etc., but people see right through it. It’s the never-ending class war between a tiny minority of ultra-wealthy scumbags vs. everyday people one bad day away from being homeless. Socialism will spread across the US and the battles will continue.
tern 4mo ago
Sadly, I think this is true, and it's starting to seem like my own personal political imperative is to remind people that AI can be insanely personally empowering. Many people around me are just missing the boat, or don't care, but many are also able to finally accomplish all kinds of things they've been barred from in the past. LLMs are best seen, I think, as an imagination amplifier. If you're in the mindset of finding ways to improve society and help other people, there is no shortage of opportunity, and increasingly, capability.
- blululu 4mo ago
  This could be true, but I think it amounts to wishful thinking. The human empowerment phase of AI is transitory and brief. Once you get into RSI and AGI the human is increasingly left out and disenfranchised. The multiplier of your personal effectiveness directly proportional to how much the AI is doing relative to you. Being 2x more effective is great - AI does half the work. 5x, 10x, 100x? When the AI does 99% of the work you maybe start to worry - the bottleneck to 'your' productivity is now you and you are going up against much faster and more powerful entities than yourself. This mindset is rooted in a short term gain that risks a long term loss.
  - tern 4mo ago
    Yes, I agree, but the relevant debate isn't "pro vs anti-AI." That's a fight only one side can win. The relevant debate is: "human empowerment vs disempowerment". It's still a long-shot, but at least there's a specific target that a majority may be able to agree on. (Not saying you were specifically saying either.)
    - justonepost2 4mo ago
      I think his point is that “human empowerment vs disempowerment”, in the long term, is itself a fight that only one side can win.
      - tern 4mo ago
        I mean, fair—it's a possibility. But what are we to do with a point of view that admits no positive outcome?
martythemaniak 4mo ago
The problem is not the technology but the size and dominance of the tech sector. Current AI is a promising new technology that can do a lot great stuff, just like the internet and smartphones. But in the 90s the tech sector was tiny, and even in the late 2000s the current behemoths were like 20x smaller than they are today. Today the tech companies dominate people's lives and attention, everything people do goes through a few companies in one way or another. The google of 2007 was a plucky underdog who promised to Do No Evil. Today they are so huge, the size itself is scary. Instead of being happy you got 2GB free email, you're slightly anxious about accidentally getting flagged by some automated recourse-less system that'll lock you out of your data and disrupt your life significantly. AI startups don't offer a respite, they small but even more scammy and slight-of-hand-y. AI industry marketing is best summed up as "You're a worthless piece of shit NPC and we'll take your job, your personal data and your attention. Buy our shit" That is to say, people probably understand (on vibe level mostly) that this great new tech will be leveraged to the max by bad rich people to make their lives worse. Nothing innate about the tech dictates this, but it is the way things are turning out. I expect more backlash in the future.
erikschoster 4mo ago
> The backlash is only just getting started, because the technology is only just getting started, too. Britain’s flimsy prime-minister-in-waiting, Andy Burnham, has barely said a word about AI. Even Americans still rank it 29th out of 39 election issues. [..] That is bound to change—and battles over data centres offer a hint of the struggles to come. Or we'll see through the bullshit (which seems to be happening already) and this will fizzle out. I have a great face-saving exit plan for AI companies: follow anthropic's lead and pretend you're saving the world by not releasing anything to the public anymore. Then just quietly back away, go bankrupt and let us all eventually forget.
- lostmsu 4mo ago
  You can't put the genie in the bottle.
mattas 4mo ago
Outside of the "this will take your job" messaging, there is simply fatigue around just seeing it _everywhere_. The poor horse has been completely emulsified.
karmakurtisaani 4mo ago
I have an anecdote I'm dying to share and will be happy to have it buried here! I was talking to an academic friend of mine who works in a CS theory group in a top university. He told me now only 2 out of 10 members of the group work on theory anymore, the rest are doing applied/industry projects. The ratio used to inverted, but now the theory people are worried AI will replace them, so they look for ways out.
negergreger 4mo ago
[dead]
Henchman21 4mo ago
I mean… sure! You’ve got propaganda on both sides whipping people into a frenzy. Are we pretending today that isn’t happening??
Gud 4mo ago
The problem is that a majority of the world sustain their living by selling their labour as a commodity, while a small minority control the economy via ownership of capital. For the owning class of people most of us are the same thing as a bucket of paint, a car or any another commodity. It doesn't have to be this way, but it is.
kkir 4mo ago
Reminds me of > First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then you win.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
"Data centres must contend with viral worries over water usage, a confected issue. (Modern ones drink up no more than other industries, and much less in total than America's golf courses.)" There seems to be an assumption that people care about (a) the amount of water used by data centres and whether data centres use less, the same or more water than other industries, and/or (b) whether data centres use use less water than golf courses If data centres use less then why would anyone care. They might care not about comparative water across industries but about a particular industry, e..g., "AI" data centres, for some other reason(s). Their opinion on that industry's water use, and any other behaviour, is based on their pre-formed opinion of the industry For example, If someone does not play golf, then any amount of water used by golf courses may be offensive. It doesn't matter how this amount compares with other industries If someone does not use "AI" or does not like using "AI", then any amount of water used by "AI" data centres may be offensive. It doesn't matter how the amount compares to other industries To counter the "viral worries", there are "viral assurances", a confected resolution But are these assurances effective in addressing the underlying reality that some people don't use "AI" or dislike using "AI" and may have formed opinions about "AI" based on other criteria The assurances seem "tone deaf" for lack of a better term For example, the golf course development industry does not generate press releases and sponsor over-the-top PR that proclaims "everyone will play golf in the future", golf will replace human labor, nor is the golf course industry announcing multi-billion dollar transactions daily, ostensibly defeating candidates in local elections through PAC's, lobbying governments against regulation, etc., etc. (This is only a sample of a list of differences is much longer than the list of similarities. The inordinate amount of attention paid to the "AI" industry in the press, endless hype, is not comparable to the amount of attention paid to the golf course industry nor other comment agriculture industry examples) The comparisons are nonsensical

98 points by andsoitis 4mo ago

people conflate "AI is overhyped" with "AI is useless" and neither is quite right. the backlash is mostly against the hype cycle not the tech itself. give it 2 years

simianwords 4mo ago
This is often repeated but not true. Ed Zitron conflates the two all the time.
throwfaraway135 4mo ago
AI is already too useful to discard, we could automate 90% bureaucracy and government jobs and no one would feel the difference. But of course fear/angst/rage sells.
- shimman 4mo ago
  AI is so useful they have to subsidize it with trillions of dollars while having no near term profit. AI is so useful that you have to threaten workers in order for them to use the tools. I'm sorry but all of this is to be determined but if the present is any indicator LLMs tend to make things distinctly worse, not better. Any areas of "potential" still rely on massive amounts of manual human labor, hardly a trillion dollar industry. "Useful" in the sense of cheap parlor tricks, useful in the real sense that it enables mass surveillance on the cheap; but actually useless for the material lives of people around the world. I'm sure it's great if you're a rich tech bro.
  - pixl97 4mo ago
    Conflating useful and profitable is a strawman you've created yourself. There are plenty of issues with AI but that's a weird hill to stand on.
    - customguy 4mo ago
      Whereas randomly ranting against "bureaucracy", in light of DOGE and Epstein emails (elite = morons) and what Thiel and the Palantir CEO are on about, is totally normal, isn't projection at all, and talking about "rage" isn't a strawman either. No, that requires a serious rebuttal, being a serious argument and all.
  - hatefulheart 4mo ago
    Indeed it is so self evidently useful that you have to discover the correct way to use it.
  - adamddev1 4mo ago
    I made one language learning app with a top end LLM backend and at first I thought it was magic. But as I and other people used it more I realized: - This thing is very consistently lying and misleading people. Do I want to introduce more deception and confusion into the world? - people don't actually want to use this. - I don't actually want to use this. - Something about this feels wrong. I dropped it. I have another couple of big language learning projects made with 100% human blood sweat and tears, long projects over many years. Zero LLMs or voice models used for anything. Those continue to grow and are loved, and I feel great about them.
  - programmarchy 4mo ago
    Railroads had enormous subsidies, too. This is how infrastructure is built, even in "capitalist" economies because it operates at the level of national security. Even to this day, passenger rail is not profitable, although freight is very profitable. So it wouldn't be surprising if "passenger" AI remains unprofitable, while "freight" AI becomes very profitable. Pretty bold statement to say it's useless for most people outside of tech. Almost every "normal" person I know including my in-laws are using it regularly. It's becoming the go-to for asking questions rather than Google, Bing, etc. And the privacy battle was lost 25 years ago. People don't really care if corporations know about their search history (Google), or their private lives (Facebook). You're beating a dead horse there.
    - shimman 4mo ago
      I like your analogy on railroads because it leads us to the point that these tech companies should honestly be nationalized at this point as they are a danger to the country writ large.
- dippogriff 4mo ago
  They tried that a few times and the mistakes have had consequences.
- dickiedyce 4mo ago
  "...and no one would feel the difference" does speak to the inadequcy of bureaucracy and government execution. Maybe we wouldn't notice the difference with our interactions with bureaucracy and government, but fairly certain we'd notice the jobs market being flooded with Golgafrincham's cast-offs.
  - customguy 4mo ago
    > "...and no one would feel the difference" does speak to the inadequcy of bureaucracy and government execution. Well, the attempt to claim that speaks to something, but the claim doesn't really, because it's not true. Let's not even try to get people to think about people who are not them, people who are in need, people with disabled children, whatever. I don't know about the US because it has very few spaces where people actually live together like humans would, but for the majority of the world, at least in major cities: nevermind healthcare or pensions and whatnot, just consider garbage disposal, and maintenance of plumbing and sewer system, the electric grid, and lots of other "small" things like that. The shit we take for granted and corporations moan about because it cuts into their profits and reduces the costs they can externalize slightly. Regulations that say they can't just put saw dust and some heroin in food, that type of thing. That came to be because that's the type of shit they just could not stop doing. If you could quicksave and experience that just for yourself, without fucking life up really badly for everyone else and for decades, you totally should. I don't think most people who talk this stuff from myopic bubbles would last even a week. Because they don't think so well, we know this from the arguments, and are not likeable, we know this from how they don't consider other people. So to me that's absolute bottom of the food chain energy talking about the Ark B. Pure, pristine, unadulterated projection.
- adamddev1 4mo ago
  People absolutely would feel the difference if AI models started making 90% of the decisions. You were just denied an application because some LLM decided you fit a certain statistical pattern. Where did the LLM go wrong? What were the steps taken to make that decision? Who can you appeal to? Nobody. AI bureaucracy would just keep chugging along, making decisions based on prejudices and patterns it finds but doesn't feel. Rainer Mühlhoff makes some compelling arguments in trying to warn people of the dangers of an AI bureaucracy/state.
  - treis 4mo ago
    What do you think the government is like today? At least with LLMs you'd get your incorrect answer quickly and cheaply.
    - adamddev1 4mo ago
      Human incompetence, or human-written algorithmic incompetence in code can still be identified, appealed to, and dealt with. With LLMs you get incompetence cut off from human embodiment and any chance of empathy, baked into opaque black-boxes, and automated and scaled. We should be arriving to build things that are correct, not saying "stuff sucks already, let's make more stuff that sucks."
      - treis 4mo ago
        There are theoretically appeals but for the most part they're illusionary. The original decision is given a lot of deference and the appeal is almost always denied. Plus it's gated beyond a lot of time and money. In adversarial proceedings that's a weapon for one side or the other.
- marcuskaz 4mo ago
  The US government employees around 3m people, I'm pretty sure 2.7m people losing their jobs would feel the difference.
- hvbcvbxcvbcvbx 4mo ago
  Why would you start with literally the only thing keeping you alive? Automate corporate bullshit. Keep your hands off the government. They are literally the only ones incentivized to not use you as toilet paper.
- strken 4mo ago
  I'm starting to think that when non-experts believe a job will be easy to automate with AI, it usually has hidden elements which they don't understand and which make automating it almost impossible. Meanwhile, there are all these intellectual jobs which are hard for humans to do, so we assume they're just hard in general. Look closer, though, and many don't involve human social interaction, only require a small amount of good taste, and don't have any physical component.
- fabianholzer 4mo ago
  The reason for the existence of bloated bureaucracy is political will not the technical inability to automate processes before the advent of the current wave of AI.
- rvz 4mo ago
  > we could automate 90% bureaucracy and government jobs and no one would feel the difference. This is really naïve in the long run, since you ultimately cannot solve social problems with technical solutions. It's always techies that fail to realize the second / third and forth order of events when this level of disruption is measured by the number of mass layoffs you can do in each quarter.
- spaqin 4mo ago
  Still haven't seen anything we weren't able to do before. Faster maybe, but still rehashing everything humanity has achieved.
therobots927 4mo ago
I think a lot of it is actually the tech for a lot of reasons: 0. No one wants a datacenter in their backyard or hooked up to the grid while the electricity burden is carried by households. People are afraid of losing their property values and being unable to move away if a DC is built nearby - effectively being trapped there. People in Memphis are breathing in gas fumes from the XAI datacenter there. There are concerns about corrosion byproducts making its way into the aquifers from DC waste water. If DC construction takes the cheap option no sound insulation is installed and people can’t sleep and some even lose their hearing: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-28/living-in-hell-data-center-neighbors-grapple-with-noise-air-pollution https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2... People are pissed that towns and cities are bypassing public approval to placate corporate builders. 1. People have been told to fear for their jobs 2. Many people believe labs have stolen vast amounts of intellectual property 3. Engineers are being pressured to use AI and told they “aren’t prompting right” if/when it doesn’t work for their use case I can go on. But I actually think the majority of the backlash has nothing to do with stock valuations.
- sanderjd 4mo ago
  I don't think this article is about the backlash among software engineers, but rather society at large. What's going on among software engineers is interesting, but I think it's a different thing, not a microcosm of the mainstream backlash.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - therobots927 4mo ago
    Ok thanks for the nitpick bud. It’s the last item in a priority first list but go off dude
- cryptopian 4mo ago
  > But I actually think the majority of the backlash has nothing to do with stock valuations. I think it exacerbates the points you make. "You mean, you want to take all the IP, immediately force the tech on us, maybe make my job redundant, and you want billions in funding for it!?"
frankie_t 4mo ago
I think AI backlash has less to do with the tech itself and more with its broader impact on society in the current system, if it delivers a quarter of its promises. Those doing the backlashing feel that they are going to lose much more than they are going to gain.
- doctorwho42 4mo ago
  If it delivers a quarter of its promises, we enter the likes of the great depression. But instead of everyone feeling the squeeze, you will have literal breakdowns in society because our media-corps have been using the social lives of the wealthy as a distraction for so long... "Let them eat cake...", I wonder what the 'taken out of context' trigger will be this time around
- davidpapermill 4mo ago
  AI also has the misfortune of coinciding with a very difficult period for young people, including limited job opportunities: the financial crash, COVID, Brexit, the political polarisation in the western world. In some sense it's probably acting as a lightning rod for resentment, and that resentment is combined with marketing spiel from the model companies alongside well-placed concern over the impact of AI on employment.
- leoedin 4mo ago
  I've spoken to a lot of people outside of software development who feel this way. It's mainly a sense of "what is this for?". It's obvious that the presence of AI means everyone has to use it, but it isn't obvious yet exactly what good it will bring to most people. Certainly in my own life it's made some things easier. But that just means I move on to the next thing quicker - the treadmill never stops. Does AI improve my life yet? I'm not so certain. It also has huge environmental costs, pushes up energy prices, pushes up computing hardware prices and sucks attention away from other things. Is it cool? Yes. Is it likely to be society changing. Yes. Does it make anyone's lives better? TBC.
mritchie712 4mo ago
There's another "they took our jobs" group that doesn't fit into "AI is overhyped" or "AI is useless". They see that AI is capable and fear it.
- dgellow 4mo ago
  They see the leadership reaction to what AI is capable of and fear it.
jerf 4mo ago
We software engineers have a different experience with AI than most other fields. We have vast arrays of guardrails in our field, with unit testing, CI/CD, source control being relatively easy since we mostly produce textual artifacts, strong typing, compilers with decades of experience in giving targeted error messages, all sorts of things [1]. When AI takes two steps forward and then does something stupid, we have so many guardrails that our harnesses can easily get the error message, feed it back in, and the AI can pick up the pieces and carry on. We hardly even notice this process. If you watch an AI and dig into the details of everything it is doing, you can see it repeatedly banging into these guard rails. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily. As a human being, I bang into those guard rails all the time too. That's where they came from in the first place, to let humans bang into them. And we've built a lot of them. However, in a lot of the rest of the world their experience with AI much more resembles that of the more critical voices that post here. A lawyer who uses an AI that makes two correct citations and then an incorrect one has many fewer automated guard rails to work with. It is relatively easy to imagine a system that at least verifies the citation exists (I've heard that's easier said than done due to the system depending on humans to resolve sloppy references but still it's feasible), but the task of deciding if the AI correctly used the citation, either in the abstract sense of it being correct or in the sense of it being the best way to use it to advance the current case, is a vastly harder decision than "ah, that change failed to compile, try again". Accounting seems like another good example. Yes, it has the obvious guard rail of "do the books balance", but that's the beginning of accounting, not the end. It's difficult to put up guard rails for how the accounting is done from there. An accountant will experience an AI accountant as doing OK sometimes but making really dumb decisions that couldn't be caught by anything other than human review, and I have to imagine that the lack of learning and the way the AI will tend to make the same mistakes over and over must be incredibly aggravating. I think there's probably more truth to "AI is useless" than we may see. I think a lot more people than we realize have had the experience of using AI a while, putting some trust in it, then having that trust grotesquely violated when it says something stupid in an email or makes boneheaded errors in a spreadsheet. We're maybe just now exiting the portion of the hype cycle where it is simply culturally unacceptable to criticize the AI and entering the part where it is culturally both acceptable and expected, and we software engineers may look on in bafflement at the other fields and their complaints because it's working for us, what's your problem? [1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/programming_is_engineering/ https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/programming_is_engineering/
jcgrillo 4mo ago
OK but I already gave it 2yrs. How many 2yr grace periods do they get before it becomes clear they're simply lying? It really doesn't help to have stuff like this in print: > a technology that could power a surge in productivity and incomes, help find cures for untreatable diseases and improve everything from education to green tech. They just take these claims completely uncritically and move on. Where is the productivity increase? Where are the cured diseases? Where are the improvements in education and green tech? So far, it's all a big fat zero. Maybe in 2yrs some of this will actually be true? Is that the hope? This is scammer shit. If any of this was true you wouldn't have to ask for extra time. EDIT: The fact we're all calling this "AI" is part of the problem. It's not AI yet, it's still ML. The Overton red-shift comes for us all in the end.
__MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
Agreed. We've been working on or with AI for 70 years. What's new is that the billionaires recently started drooling over it.
jasperry 4mo ago
The proper backlash should be not about its capability level but how it's being used. AI is being adopted to deploy mass surveillance on an unprecedented scale, and to make decisions that affect people's lives without being evaluated by a human first. Those seem worthy of lashing back against.

suzukivenom 4mo ago

can someone paste the not-paywalled link please

leokeba 4mo ago

https://archive.is/A1bE8 https://archive.is/A1bE8

josefritzishere 4mo ago

Frankly, most AI is pretty meh, really only impressing AI enthusiasts, with their near religious fervor. There's a big delta there between power users and everyone else. It writes bad emails, messy code, incorrect metrics, dubious slide decks, ugly graphics... the consumer rejection of AI is only growing. At the same time, the product itself is sold wildly below cost. So it needs to be increase in price at the same time users are rejecting it. This is only ending with a huge market correction.

cryo32 4mo ago
That’s roughly it. I don’t really have a use for it myself that I can’t solve some other way cheaper or easier without the damage and uncertainty it does. I’m not really that impressed.
adamddev1 4mo ago
It seems by definition "below par" of whatever human activity it's training on. How can we achieve greater and greater heights of intelligence if we're just creeping closer and closer to a sub-par copy of human creative activity.
- orangecat 4mo ago
  It seems by definition "below par" of whatever human activity it's training on How many sub-par mathematicians could solve the unit distance conjecture?
playorizaya 4mo ago
[flagged]
phantompeace 4mo ago
How do you know it's being served at wildly below cost? AFAIK API pricing across the board is actually higher than what inference would cost? Yes there are subscription plans that subsidise tokens but they exist primarily to hook people in, so as to encourage their workplace to adopt it, whereby they then have to pay for an enterprise plan with zero subsidies like the subscription plans have. Training is very expensive, but you only do that once. I predict costs will fall.

vitorfblima 4mo ago

The untold promise of IA is to replace labor. That's probably the only reason why some people are willing to spend trillions of dollars in pursuing this technology. Mere tools would never justify this kind of investment. It's no surprise that people are getting angry, even though many are using AI in their everyday life.

gruez 4mo ago
>The untold promise of [tractors] is to replace labor. [...] Mere tools would never justify this kind of investment. How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today.
- vitorfblima 4mo ago
  We're talking about ALL labor.
  - gruez 4mo ago
    Do you think the average dirt farmer in the 1800 is going to be assuaged by the prospect of almost all farm work being mechanized, because he can be a "medical and health services manager" or "data scientist" instead? https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm
    - dofm 4mo ago
      What's a dirt farmer?
      - vitorfblima 4mo ago
        You guessed it.
      - alamortsubite 4mo ago
        As opposed to a moisture farmer, presumably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aran_Islands#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aran_Islands#History If you're never seen Man of Aran, you're in for a treat! Far more thought provoking than the fluff Lucas made, but by which I always assumed his fictional homestead on Tatooine was inspired.

dippogriff 4mo ago

If the labs weren't so aggressive with building datacenters in people's backyards, this could've been a different story. People don't like it when pipelines are built in their backyard either.

gruez 4mo ago
From TFA: >The buildings summon a vitriol well beyond conventional nimbyism. More Americans say they would be happy with a nuclear reactor next door than a data centre. Even plans to build one in the Utah desert have met with passionate opposition.
- BeetleB 4mo ago
  BTW, the anti-data center movement predates LLMs by a margin. Near where I live the locals were upset before COVID - they employ very few people, use a lot of land, and pay little to no taxes. It's just that they're building them at such a large scale now that you see more and more people protesting them.
baron816 4mo ago
Are they built in people’s backyards? There’s a famous case in Northern Virginia that has admitted they messed up zoning which gets cited in every story to make it look like they’re all built in people’s backyards, but the vast majority of them are in industrial zones.
- BeetleB 4mo ago
  For a lot of folks (including near where I live), "building in my small city" is the same as "backyard". The narrative is "Use up a lot of land, pay almost no taxes, and employ almost no people."
  - rescripting 4mo ago
    Don't forget "drive up utility prices" and barring that, "pollute the air with gas generators".

supermaurio2000 4mo ago

the most stupid article i've read in the economist

randusername 4mo ago
TFA gave me brain freeze. > Third, measure everything. The common view that AI is already leading to lay-offs and raising electricity bills is probably wrong. But without better statistics it is hard to be sure. Why are they syndicating high school economics papers on AI?

layer8 4mo ago

Despite the headline, the article is largely AI-positive. > To that end, here are four pointers for politicians and AI companies looking for policies. Extrapolating from the past, none of these are particularly likely to happen, however. Another notable aspect is that, unlike many other societal issues, the backlash against AI is decidedly bipartisan.

dwa3592 4mo ago

People have been made to believe by very influential people (dario, sam, elon etc) that AI will replace them. As a result people are getting angry. Who did not see this coming? Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? There is nothing sexy about it. There is nothing cool about it either. Imagine a taxi driver facing his family knowing he will be replaced by a machine fully; imagine that taxi driver thinking that there are slick graduates from top schools who wake up everyday (waymo, tesla, zoox) with one goal in mind - let's automate this taxi driver. The anger against AI/Tech is just starting really.

estearum 4mo ago
Just because people are angry does not make it false. > Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? Because arms race. Game dynamics and incentive structures don't cease to exist just because someone notices them.
- dweinus 4mo ago
  All those devs and data scientists and PhDs make a choice though. They could quit and work somewhere else. Even in a tough market their skills are in demand. They choose to work on this every morning.
  - BeetleB 4mo ago
    Sure, they could do that. The outcome wouldn't change, though. If SW devs who worked on ride sharing apps didn't leave, why would you think these folks would? If SW devs who worked on airline ticket search engines didn't leave, why would you think these folks would? And on and on and on. The SW industry has been heavily involved in replacing jobs since its inception.
    - smaudet 4mo ago
      > The SW industry Partly the issue is, it was never the right model. If you write/wrote code, you were a manager. Probably a better one than your "people manager" ever was, but that is/was arguably a different skill. What you managed was extremely technical, more akin to a line manager or an operations manager than a people manager. Which, yes, everyone could not be the manager. Everyone who was not the manager could be quality control (QC), and handle the parts that "only a human" could handle. The problem is, AI fits in nowhere in this equation, rather it throws it out. AI can manage, like any manager it can short circuit it's QC, in pursuit of an arbitrary metric. Even the idea of "human in the loop" is fundamentally flawed - if the human is not at some level the one directing (managing), there is no reason to stop incuding the human, less and less, in the work. AI is not useful to us.

Maledictus 4mo ago

https://archive.is/A1bE8 https://archive.is/A1bE8

pelotron 4mo ago

"AI promises to change the world for the better" - so far it's clear the world will be better for a few people. A promise that it will be better for everyone reads like "trust me, bro." "Blockers need to be shown that their local area will benefit if they get out of the way." Benefit how? Will this be like when your city convinces you it's in everyone's interest to subsidize the latest billionaire-owned sports stadium? "If America succumbs [to popular rage], it could cede the global ai frontier" ah here we go. The next generation of Too Big To Fail.

adrians1 4mo ago

Remember the debate about how nuclear was stopped in the 70s because of NIMBYism? We are now wondering "how could people then be so stupid and shortsighted?". Well, there you go, here's history repeating before our eyes.

estearum 4mo ago
Not really. Nuclear power (in both the weapon and energy sense) is and always was relatively easy to manage compared to AI. If the deployment of nuclear energy required the distribution of radioactive material to every smartphone in America and for unstable isotopes to be plugged into the core operating infrastructure of every industry, then they'd be a lot closer to analogous.
- adrians1 4mo ago
  Of course. Those people back then were stupid and irrational and couldn't see they were wrong. Today we are much more enlightened and smart, and our convoluted arguments, that sound very smart and somehow reach the same conclusion that the technology must be stopped, are totally right. We're not opposed to AI due to irrational fear and NIMBYism, like those simpletons before.
  - estearum 4mo ago
    Excellent work responding to the argument put in front of you! You are so rational!
    - adrians1 4mo ago
      We're not much better than our ancestors. We'd like to think we are, because we're much more intelligent and have access to more information. But we really aren't. We're still driven by irrational sentiments and fears. We hate AI because it's new and feels icky, and will bring change and we don't like change. We would prefer the 2020s to be frozen in time forever and ever (although we're more than happy to benefit from progress that happened before our time, which upended the lives of other people long dead). So that's it, there's no argument. The only argument is "I hate AI because fuck it", which is much more sincere. I don't need to hear about water or electricity or cognitive decline or any other made up stuff that sounds intellectual.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

xvxvx 4mo ago

The best scenario for AI companies is that they replace the human workforce with their bots and make all the money. It’s a sick, amplified version of outsourced labor. I’ve been rereading Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of The United States’ and the US has been doing this since day zero. Build the economy on indentured servitude. Replace that with slavery. Flood cities with freed slaves when wages get too high. Flood the country with illegals for the same reason. Offshore the work to poor countries. Automate as much as possible. Now AI. Kudos to the AI leaders for the carefully manicured publicity, claiming this will make everyone free etc., but people see right through it. It’s the never-ending class war between a tiny minority of ultra-wealthy scumbags vs. everyday people one bad day away from being homeless. Socialism will spread across the US and the battles will continue.

tern 4mo ago

Sadly, I think this is true, and it's starting to seem like my own personal political imperative is to remind people that AI can be insanely personally empowering. Many people around me are just missing the boat, or don't care, but many are also able to finally accomplish all kinds of things they've been barred from in the past. LLMs are best seen, I think, as an imagination amplifier. If you're in the mindset of finding ways to improve society and help other people, there is no shortage of opportunity, and increasingly, capability.

blululu 4mo ago
This could be true, but I think it amounts to wishful thinking. The human empowerment phase of AI is transitory and brief. Once you get into RSI and AGI the human is increasingly left out and disenfranchised. The multiplier of your personal effectiveness directly proportional to how much the AI is doing relative to you. Being 2x more effective is great - AI does half the work. 5x, 10x, 100x? When the AI does 99% of the work you maybe start to worry - the bottleneck to 'your' productivity is now you and you are going up against much faster and more powerful entities than yourself. This mindset is rooted in a short term gain that risks a long term loss.
- tern 4mo ago
  Yes, I agree, but the relevant debate isn't "pro vs anti-AI." That's a fight only one side can win. The relevant debate is: "human empowerment vs disempowerment". It's still a long-shot, but at least there's a specific target that a majority may be able to agree on. (Not saying you were specifically saying either.)
  - justonepost2 4mo ago
    I think his point is that “human empowerment vs disempowerment”, in the long term, is itself a fight that only one side can win.
    - tern 4mo ago
      I mean, fair—it's a possibility. But what are we to do with a point of view that admits no positive outcome?

martythemaniak 4mo ago

The problem is not the technology but the size and dominance of the tech sector. Current AI is a promising new technology that can do a lot great stuff, just like the internet and smartphones. But in the 90s the tech sector was tiny, and even in the late 2000s the current behemoths were like 20x smaller than they are today. Today the tech companies dominate people's lives and attention, everything people do goes through a few companies in one way or another. The google of 2007 was a plucky underdog who promised to Do No Evil. Today they are so huge, the size itself is scary. Instead of being happy you got 2GB free email, you're slightly anxious about accidentally getting flagged by some automated recourse-less system that'll lock you out of your data and disrupt your life significantly. AI startups don't offer a respite, they small but even more scammy and slight-of-hand-y. AI industry marketing is best summed up as "You're a worthless piece of shit NPC and we'll take your job, your personal data and your attention. Buy our shit" That is to say, people probably understand (on vibe level mostly) that this great new tech will be leveraged to the max by bad rich people to make their lives worse. Nothing innate about the tech dictates this, but it is the way things are turning out. I expect more backlash in the future.

erikschoster 4mo ago

> The backlash is only just getting started, because the technology is only just getting started, too. Britain’s flimsy prime-minister-in-waiting, Andy Burnham, has barely said a word about AI. Even Americans still rank it 29th out of 39 election issues. [..] That is bound to change—and battles over data centres offer a hint of the struggles to come. Or we'll see through the bullshit (which seems to be happening already) and this will fizzle out. I have a great face-saving exit plan for AI companies: follow anthropic's lead and pretend you're saving the world by not releasing anything to the public anymore. Then just quietly back away, go bankrupt and let us all eventually forget.

lostmsu 4mo ago
You can't put the genie in the bottle.

mattas 4mo ago

Outside of the "this will take your job" messaging, there is simply fatigue around just seeing it _everywhere_. The poor horse has been completely emulsified.

karmakurtisaani 4mo ago

I have an anecdote I'm dying to share and will be happy to have it buried here! I was talking to an academic friend of mine who works in a CS theory group in a top university. He told me now only 2 out of 10 members of the group work on theory anymore, the rest are doing applied/industry projects. The ratio used to inverted, but now the theory people are worried AI will replace them, so they look for ways out.

negergreger 4mo ago

[dead]

Henchman21 4mo ago

I mean… sure! You’ve got propaganda on both sides whipping people into a frenzy. Are we pretending today that isn’t happening??

Gud 4mo ago

The problem is that a majority of the world sustain their living by selling their labour as a commodity, while a small minority control the economy via ownership of capital. For the owning class of people most of us are the same thing as a bucket of paint, a car or any another commodity. It doesn't have to be this way, but it is.

kkir 4mo ago

Reminds me of > First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then you win.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago

"Data centres must contend with viral worries over water usage, a confected issue. (Modern ones drink up no more than other industries, and much less in total than America's golf courses.)" There seems to be an assumption that people care about (a) the amount of water used by data centres and whether data centres use less, the same or more water than other industries, and/or (b) whether data centres use use less water than golf courses If data centres use less then why would anyone care. They might care not about comparative water across industries but about a particular industry, e..g., "AI" data centres, for some other reason(s). Their opinion on that industry's water use, and any other behaviour, is based on their pre-formed opinion of the industry For example, If someone does not play golf, then any amount of water used by golf courses may be offensive. It doesn't matter how this amount compares with other industries If someone does not use "AI" or does not like using "AI", then any amount of water used by "AI" data centres may be offensive. It doesn't matter how the amount compares to other industries To counter the "viral worries", there are "viral assurances", a confected resolution But are these assurances effective in addressing the underlying reality that some people don't use "AI" or dislike using "AI" and may have formed opinions about "AI" based on other criteria The assurances seem "tone deaf" for lack of a better term For example, the golf course development industry does not generate press releases and sponsor over-the-top PR that proclaims "everyone will play golf in the future", golf will replace human labor, nor is the golf course industry announcing multi-billion dollar transactions daily, ostensibly defeating candidates in local elections through PAC's, lobbying governments against regulation, etc., etc. (This is only a sample of a list of differences is much longer than the list of similarities. The inordinate amount of attention paid to the "AI" industry in the press, endless hype, is not comparable to the amount of attention paid to the golf course industry nor other comment agriculture industry examples) The comparisons are nonsensical