Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by coffeecat » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 6:48 PM UTC

chasil wrote: post #96

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 fundament…

> 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."

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

#232

Post by Zigurd » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 6:48 PM UTC

dogleash wrote: post #87

newtonianrules wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do combat sports have to do with anything?

Correctly punctuated it's "combat" "sports" being neither combat nor a sport.

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

#233

Post by Jtarii » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 6:48 PM UTC

arjie wrote: post #155

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…

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?

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

#234

Post by vrganj » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 6:48 PM UTC

hparadiz wrote: post #106

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…

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.

> $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...

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

#235

Post by michaelrpeskin » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 6:48 PM UTC

breezybottom wrote: post #128

jstummbillig wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is completely incoherent. Of course we need deterministic computer programs; much of society depends on it.

What does the N in NP stand for?

I'm a bit joking, but we've been working in deterministic computation for so long, we don't even think of there being another way.

But seriously, I do view AI as the input to a deterministic machine. Junior engineers (well all engineers) aren't deterministic, and we've made processes to direct their behavior towards making better software. AI agents do a better job of following my processes than engineers. We move up the stack towards testing and verification rather than writing. That doesn't make me sad, after 40 years of coding, I'm kind of tired of it. I have more ideas than I can code, so I'm happy to give AI my ideas and have it code for me.

I had a former manager tell me that all technology problems are really people problems, now maybe all technology problems are all agent problems and we just have to get comfortable with managing agents like we got comfortable with managing people.

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

#236

Post by randycupertino » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 6:48 PM UTC

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.

Also the AI chat just straight up lies to you and is flat out wrong. When I landed in Peru and was trying to get my phone working, verizon AI told me my account had international calling set up and was working fine but when I finally got to a human they were like "oh I see what the problem is your account doesn't have that option activated, let me add it for you right now." It was a huge stressor as I was there for various meetings and couldn't call my contacts or use my phone! Trying to use the stupid AI agent wasted 2 hours of my jet-lagged time it was so miserable trying to get through to a human who could help me.

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

#237

Post by singpolyma3 » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 6:49 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #202

slg wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 realis…

> 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 mod…

I mean. From a financial PoV that's exactly what happened

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

#238

Post by kypro » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 6:49 PM UTC

gortok wrote: post #29

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 di…

> 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.

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

#239

Post by cryo32 » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 6:50 PM UTC

atleastoptimal wrote: post #227

cryo32 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are having no problems raising capital. People are offering up their homes to get Anthropic stock. >It is not ok to lobby and manipulate governments for fiscal policy changes to write off the costs and risks on the general public. How are they doing this? What are you referring to?

[dead]

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

#240

Post by agoodusername63 » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 6:50 PM UTC

bwestergard wrote: post #181

manoDev wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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." I think the trouble, economically speaking, is that while it will be possible from a purely technical standpoint to unbundle a job performed by a human into separate tasks, many of which can be "done" by agents, the new process will not…

Conversations about the costs of inference never consider the reality that API pricing is significantly higher than the operating costs.

Nor do they ever consider that the cost of datacenter hosted inference has to crash when the bubble pops and hardware vendors can't fill orders at sky high prices created by demand anymore and the hyperscalers can't keep things running near capacity at the high demand prices.

All of which leads to the ROI math for implementing AI looking much different.

Has everybody forgotten how much money Nvidia, TSMC, and all the hyperscalers are making, today, in pure profit? The costs of inference are high because we're in a bubble.