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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

#311

Post by mgfist »

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.

I don't care about human vs AI, I just want my issue resolved. Whatever does that the best and fastest. Or even better, for there to not be an issue in the first place.

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

#312

Post by aDyslecticCrow »

JoBrad wrote: post #199
slg wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of American society will get to share in the benefits of those new biological and medical discoveries when we don't have any health insurance because we lost our jobs to AI?

An optimistic view is that the jobs displaced by AI will be like the jobs displaced by industrialization: while fewer people will be needed to do the task, there will be more demand for the task over time, opening up new jobs with different skill sets than the previous job required. At least one data point in favor of this view is the middling success of the AI rollout so far. Of course it’s eclipsed in the short run…

> jobs displaced by industrialization

This argument is cute and all, but ... does a data-point of 1 from 200 years ago really give us much confidence? We replaced physical labor with a massive service sector.

Now we're automating the service sector so now people can go to... eeh... the 3rd category of jobs? Seems like physical labor is the most stable career at the moment; what machines have not already automated is pretty difficult to replace it turns out. But we outsourced most of that to low cost countries except plumbers and electricians.

But will a population of plumbers really be able to maintain a population of plumbers employed?

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

#313

Post by LastTrain »

cryo32 wrote: post #125
idank wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The success of AI doesn't hinge on whether you can vibecode it all or even one particular sector really well. For example, despite several attempts to make vibecoding PCBs, it's still pretty crap. But it's really useful as a copilot, human in the loop for targeted tasks in electronics. Same for CAD work, not so good at drawing but still useful at looking at an image, understanding it, and answering specific questions…

The reality is experience isn't codified in text. It's passed person to person over long periods of time. And you can't train an LLM on that.

Yes. For every line of code or documentation I write there is a lengthy internal dialog that can never be scraped & used by an LLM.

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

#314

Post by watwut »

jondlm wrote: post #94
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…

This... this... this! This resonates soooo deeply with me. The wild thing is that these tech "systems" (aka companies) are made up of ostensibly good people. It's often impossible to look at individual people and say, "they're the cause of this damage." I believe that some form of evil (this word feel inadequate) emerges amidst these large systems that is incredibly hard to pinpoint. It's why dissension is so fucking…

I think that CEOs of those companies are ethically challenged people, narcissists and sociopaths.

They are not evil and there is no evil emerging in big systems. It is that in the above have advantage in winner takes all economy and use that advantage to gain more advantages. So they end up on top. And once they are high enough, law dont apply to them. Which makes them go even higher.

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

#315

Post by cozzyd »

idank wrote: post #95
AngryData wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The success of AI doesn't hinge on whether you can vibecode it all or even one particular sector really well. For example, despite several attempts to make vibecoding PCBs, it's still pretty crap. But it's really useful as a copilot, human in the loop for targeted tasks in electronics. Same for CAD work, not so good at drawing but still useful at looking at an image, understanding it, and answering specific questions…

It can barely read a datasheet correctly, in my experience, getting confused between different registers.

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

#316

Post by squidsoup »

jchw wrote: post #124
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…

> And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes -- rather common culture was hollowed out, friends were distracted, friends fell down their own extremist rabbit holes. Yeah... It's actually not so hard for me to just not take part in social media. The big struggle is that what I'd like to leave more than anything is a world born of its influence . The small percentage of people who are willing to go outward to p…

> It's actually not so hard for me to just not take part in social media

Unfortunately that’s not quite as easy for people in creative professions that must now use social media to promote themselves and their work.

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

#317

Post by sleples »

Jtarii wrote: post #248
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…

Yeah, I'm sure the public will totally 180 on AI as soon as the newest model release rolls out lmfao

People here genuinely think public perception on AI is a model issue, that's how you know it's become an echo chamber.

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

#318

Post by [deleted] »

jondlm wrote: post #94
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…

This... this... this! This resonates soooo deeply with me. The wild thing is that these tech "systems" (aka companies) are made up of ostensibly good people. It's often impossible to look at individual people and say, "they're the cause of this damage." I believe that some form of evil (this word feel inadequate) emerges amidst these large systems that is incredibly hard to pinpoint. It's why dissension is so fucking…

[deleted]

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

#319

Post by ben_w »

slg wrote: post #292
JoBrad wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An optimistic view is that the jobs displaced by AI will be like the jobs displaced by industrialization: while fewer people will be needed to do the task, there will be more demand for the task over time, opening up new jobs with different skill sets than the previous job required. At least one data point in favor of this view is the middling success of the AI rollout so far. Of course it’s eclipsed in the short run…

So just to summarize, it seems like the most optimistic outcome that the collective of HN could come up with in the hour since my original comment was that medical care would improve and you might be able to pay for it if you retrain yourself for some yet unknown new career that might suddenly appear at some point in the future. That's the optimistic vision we're asking society to buy into? No wonder it's only 16%.

The upper limit for biomedicine is halting aging, ending all illnesses including cancer and congenital genetic illnesses, and being able to bioprint replacement parts not only in the event of trauma but also as a free choice for e.g. a fully functional gender swap.

Given present culture wars, that last one may cause a lot of drama all by itself no matter how good it gets. But hopefully you get the picture about how transformative it can be.

Paying for it? Well, there's a reason I chose to move to Germany rather than the USA after the Brexit referendum.

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

#320

Post by [deleted] »

slg wrote: post #287
rayiner wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. Isn't that what happened? There was enough competition among computing companies that they weren't able to completely monopolize all the productivity improvements, but the financial benefits were mostly captured by the capital class in one way or another.[1] TVs might be cheaper today and we all like watching…

[deleted]
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