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Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

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Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#71

Post by manoDev »

AngryData wrote: post #54
cryo32 wrote: post #2

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…

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.

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#72

Post by jms703 »

everdrive wrote: post #35

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 loneli…

> 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.

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#73

Post by tennfown »

cryo32 wrote: post #2

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.

There needs to be a brutal humbling

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#74

Post by K0nserv »

jon-wood wrote: post #47
K0nserv wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 don't doubt that's true for everyone who reads HN, but having seen the other side there are loads of people who don't make the effort and could've found their own answer in the knowledge base.

I find LLM customer service to be better than the historic dumber stuff. In those you can usually say "I want to talk to a human" and it will escalate. The customer service bots of yore were far dumber and made it harder to escalate.

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#76

Post by khalic »

amalcon wrote: post #65
sheeshkebab wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The most lucrative uses of deep neural networks today are ad targeting and recommendation algorithms. Those are other places.

No this is, again, just the front facing uses that people fixate on.

The most lucrative uses should be in fintec, just by the shear volumes of cash there

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#77

Post by nozzlegear »

aspenmartin wrote: post #25
nozzlegear wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they hope they are on such a path.

Yes but what evidence is there that they aren’t? To me, scaling laws and empirical benchmark trends along with high adoption (all of this together, not individually) strongly support this, and also coding agents have become load bearing so it’s sort of already happening I would say.

I don't disagree that coding agents have high adoption when it comes to software, but I do disagree that there's high adoption outside of this industry. There's no breakthrough "Claude Code but for non-tech industries" product out there that people are picking up in droves. My brother-in-law isn't using AI to manage his construction business, for example, and my sister isn't using it to run her non-profit daycare.

The most AI usage I've seen from my wife and family is when they take pictures of our/their lawns and houses, then use ChatGPT to reimagine them with different landscaping ideas or paint trims.

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#78

Post by munk-a »

dimgl wrote: post #19
silisili wrote: post #10

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.

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).

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#79

Post by esikich »

lorecore wrote: post #34
K0nserv wrote: post #18

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.

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 flo…

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.

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#80

Post by randusername »

simonw wrote: post #4

> 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 publ…

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)

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