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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

#371

Post by nullorempty »

Most of the west is going to be fucked. We, in the west, are optimizing towards more profit. Poor get poorer every year and rich get richer. We lead multiple wars which we finance with public money. The profits go to the rich again.

China is confucian, and, unlike the west, they value a different thing.

The rich seem to forget that one can not take the riches to the grave. All the great art that explains it is forgotten and never looked at.

If in the past the rich subsidized building churches and schools and housing for the poor, nowadays rich just rake more money. They never have enough.

The outlook is bleak.

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

#372

Post by fluoridation »

olalonde wrote: post #347

Stated preferences vs revealed preferences. People say they don't like it but they still use it.

I think people don't like it being shoved in their faces and crammed down every hole. No one needs a Copilot key on their keyboard, or an AI summary in prime screen real estate of a Google search. These things (EDIT: by which I mean LLMs) are useful, but they're not that useful. They're not so useful that they should suffuse through every part of every piece of software.

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

#373

Post by torginus »

boothby wrote: post #282
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…

> The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors. Foreign militaries investing in autonomous warfare does not assuage my concerns about my country investing in autonomous warfare. Also, have you been paying attention to median wages vs median CEO wages since the 1960s? The benefits of computing really have gone to the captains of industry.

Yet, that 80s CEO, practically a peasant by modern standards of pay, had the option to cross the Atlantic in a Mach 2 supersonic airliner. If that's not the most obvious demonstration of technological prowess, I don't know what is. In contrast, the F-35, believed to be the world's most advanced fighter jet today, has a top speed of Mach 1.6

Today's CEOs get a gold-plated sky bus.

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

#374

Post by itissid »

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…

I think the main reason for this outrage is partly a confluence of factors some of which you pointed it.

But my money/theory is on what I call `alonliness` specifically due to lack of labor mobility: There is no good rapid transport connecting american interior towns to big cities and people don't want to move due to a variety of factors(real estate debt, cultural affinity to area). To be clear these people are alone but not necessary lonely(there is that going on too in other segments of the population). And once you don't understand or never had the opportunity to understand something(or rather only experience its bad side effects), you distrust it at best and fear and hate it at the worst.

If you ask people 1:1 IRL who live in communities where the main source of employment is not whatever Silicon valley businesses are. They will ask you questions or make comments like " 'those' jobs are not real American jobs!" or "Aren't you afraid of getting thrown on subway tracks in NYC?". These are actual questions i got from people there.

These give an indication of the disjointedness of the sets in the venn-diagram of of the socio-economic equality and what creates such psyche. I am not sure why some think its a PR/Comms problem for big tech.

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

#375

Post by jimbokun »

ctoth wrote: post #113
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…

What are jobs for? Should we have them? Should they be mandatory? What does it mean to have to work to eat, is this a good setup? Does everyone have to work? Should they?

How much do you trust the current US administration to guide us into a future where no one needs a job in order to get health care, food, shelter, etc?

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

#376

Post by toomuchtodo »

jimbokun wrote: post #360
toomuchtodo wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Superhuman abilities for the wealthy tech oligarchs, economic indentured servitude and slums for the rest of us. Tens of millions of people in the US alone cannot obtain basic healthcare today, how would this outcome change for them because AI solved it? The only solid paths are regulation or prying the machine from the hands of those who hold it. GLP-1s are only widely available globally affordably because the paten…

Indentured servitude implies they still need us for something once they have superhuman robots doing their bidding.

There are some grim desires these people have today they’d still have even with robots. I will not enumerate, out of decorum.

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

#377

Post by idank »

cozzyd wrote: post #315
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…

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

I'll be more forgiving: I found it gets confused easily when it extracts text from a PDF because datasheets tend to be written in a not so parseable way for a machine. But 1) if you tell it to take screenshots of said datasheet, it'll have greater success. 2) We're in year n<5 (depends how you count) of the age of LLMs, this will get better over time. Either on the LLM side or the thing you feed to it.

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

#378

Post by expedition32 »

slg wrote: post #93
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…

>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…

Now you are fired by a computer not a completely disinterested person! Progress.

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

#379

Post by layer8 »

Brendinooo wrote: post #154

My observation of society is that, by default, people tend to have a belief system of "most tech that existed before I was born was fine; any new tech is bad/unnecessary". So it doesn't surprise me that people are predisposed to not like this particular new tech.

AI seems to have a different impact here: https://fortune.com/2026/05/20/why-do-kids-hate-ai-gen-z-bac...

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

#380

Post by SpaceNoodled »

nonethewiser wrote: post #264
lwhi wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I fully agree with this. We can use the computer to build a deterministic system. People aren't fully deterministic either.

Correctness can also be guaranteed by non-deterministic systems [0]. You do trade time predictability though. It will eventually give the correct answer, we just dont know when. I keep thinking about the implications of this. So in some sense it's less about being inaccurate and more about prematurely stopping (or not having a well defined target, but that's a whole other mess). In theory, if the target is well defin…

> we just dont know when

Ah, so it's merely functionally useless, if not theoretically.

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