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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

#381

Post by baron816 »

alpha_squared wrote: post #45
baron816 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think there’s a concerted effort by the media to demonize AI though. Every third story I see on my news feeds is some sensationalist story about how AI/data centers are bad. The media does have an interest in doing this—writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.

> The media does have an interest in doing this—writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block. Maybe, but it's also pretty clear that the entire purpose and intent of delivering "AI" to the economy is to wholly wipe out labor. Do I think that's realistic? No. SpaceX's total addressable market (TAM) in their S-1 filing to go public stated as much. Their TAM is $28.5T(!) with $26.5T of it being AI. Th…

Well, my conspiracy theory is that it’s the other way around: AI leaders know they’re never going to recoup money for their investors. Money will be become useless and no one will be any richer than anyone else (though everyone will be far richer than the riches person is today). But they have to promise a mountain of riches in the future because they need those resources today to build that future.

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

#382

Post by lunar_mycroft »

simonw wrote: post #275
logicchains wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that Claude is better, it's that Gemini and Copilot are so overwhelmingly bad.

Especially the free tiers. Meta AI, too. Weaker models and less powerful harnesses give people a very sub-par experience compared to what you get if you pay for access to the better tools and models.

Normal users aren't using harnesses in the sense developers think of them. They're interacting with models where they've been shoehorned in for no good reason, or they're using them nearly entirely through chat interfaces.

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

#383

Post by pesus »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #369
pesus wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. Tedious yet necessary and ultimately unending tasks are exactly what the average person wants from automation.

Yes, but we just don’t fold that much laundry and you can easily do it while watching streaming videos. Most people don’t even own a laundry folding board.

I think you're underestimating how much laundry there is for families. But in general, it's one of the tedious things that people want automation to handle. They may not buy something just for folding laundry, but if it can do other household chores I think it could be a big success. That's a ways off in the future, though.

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

#384

Post by cryo32 »

mcmcmc wrote: post #327
cryo32 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well look at my 500 seat company. We laid off 200 people with no measurable productivity impact. And we didn't embrace AI in the process. We were just keeping the unemployment figures down. Also look at the large tech companies. Same story.

Current layoffs are more correlated with overhiring during/after Covid. The fed money printer, growing national debt and low interest rates are more to blame.

I’m not in the US

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

#385

Post by fluoridation »

nonethewiser wrote: post #253
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…

This is an interesting way of thinking about it. I generally agree. I especially agree that anti-AI sentiment partially comes from miss-using it. However: Determinism isn't a requirement for 100% correctness. A Las Vegas algorithm is randomized, non-deterministic and guarantees 100% correctness [0]. The execution can be different every time but the result will always be correct. determinism does not lose accuracy. It…

A Las Vegas algorithm requires that you have a deterministic test that can definitively determine the correctness of an intermediate result. So what you're saying is that what it takes to make LLMs give 100% correct results is having a human between the LLM and the user, who's capable of re-prompting on incorrect answers from the LLM. Well, if the human is there, why not just ask the human? What value is the random number generator adding?

Like the GP said, the point of determinism is that you can trust the correctness of the results, without doing any checking. Solved problems stay solved.

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

#386

Post by Der_Einzige »

mlsu wrote: post #186
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…

Stubbing my toe fucking sucks, but perhaps the fact that I think it sucks is actually evidence that it is secretly a good thing!

This but unironically

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

#387

Post by AngryData »

freejazz wrote: post #258
AngryData wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kamala is a turd regardless of how much worse Trump is. She was advocating the status quo while people are worried we are maintaining an unsustainable path and their lives are only getting harder. When one person says we are going to slowly drive a train off a cliff and the other says they will drive quickly but may or may not drive off a cliff, I understand why many people at the front of the train would take the ri…

Trump sells all sorts of things. Anyone buying any of it is a fool.

I agree. But when the opposition tells you your shitty life will remain shitty in a best case scenario it isn't very inspiring or invigorating which you need to entice people to actually go vote for someone.

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

#388

Post by squidsoup »

andrewmutz wrote: post #206
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…

It's beyond tech. Optimism in general is out of fashion, and pessimism is pervasive. The technology for delivering bad news and highly-engaging outrage-bait has developed much faster than our society has been able to adapt to it. Just as americans don't trust AI or the tech industry, they don't trust any public institutions. The fundamental problem is not AI or tech or institutions being bad. The fundamental problem…

> Optimism in general is out of fashion, and pessimism is pervasive.

Hardly surprising given we are not collectively making sufficient change to avert climate disaster. There’s no negative bias or spin there - the majority of climate scientists agree that we’ve passed the tipping point.

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

#389

Post by expedition32 »

nathan_compton wrote: post #330
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…

It took decades if not hundreds of years for the social disruption of industrialization to clear. I literally do not give a fuck about some hypothetical more productive activity I might be able to do in 150 years if it destroys my very real present ability to take care of my family today.

Indeed. The industrial age led to great things to be sure but there were also 11 year old girls working in factories and families living in basements.

It took a long time for politicians to notice that Karl Marx had a fucking point.

"May you live in interesting times" as the Chinese say.

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

#390

Post by hintymad »

This is not surprising. The AI folks, especially people like Dario, kept screaming from the bottom of their lungs that AI is bad, AI is dangerous, AI is going to grab X% of the jobs, wealth is going to concentrate to about 10M people, and etc. Why would average Americans think positively of AI at all?

It looks those guys are acting on asymmetrical risks: if they speak optimistically about AI yet they are wrong down the road, they may get angry mobs. If they speak pessimistically about AI and they are wrong, the worst is that they get mocked.

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