This is a problem of misaligned incentives that echoes other waves of new technology. The arrival of the washing machine was not resisted, because it directly benefited people who could now move up to higher value and less difficult work. AI doesn't seem to be playing out that way.
The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it
111–120 of 399 posts
Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it
#112Tbh I don't care if vibe coding or generated art is produced as I think general public will eventually accept them or decide when it's worth to use/consume those kind of products.
What I really hate is agentic customer support, sales etc. - when you have to use them you realize how stupid the workflows, tool call, MCP, and all that garbage that is glued is just to reduce costs instead of churn.
PS: Ironically I'm working on coding an "agentic platform" for the product suite and their backend services. I simply don't feel confident about the product I'm building but I guess it is paying my bills for the moment
Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it…
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"lifestyle expectations"
$12k might be nice in parts of Asia, but when the average rent is $1200/month, it doesn't go very far anywhere in the US.
Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it
#114> Even within tech and coding, one of the areas where AI is reported to have the most promise, there’s the question of whether the productivity gains reported can be trusted.
I wish articles like this would at least acknowledge the massive adoption AI has among programmers. It's not comparable to stuff like helping you write the occasional email, which I presume is the baseline for most people outside tech. Making it sound like a minor tool that some people are still just experimenting with completely misses the impact it has already had on software development.
Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it…
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These years, knowing what is tongue-in-cheek can be very difficult.
Many of us see the current US administration as being either real life modern nazis or heavily influenced by such.
So I was wondering; are you being serious?
Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it…
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Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it
#117This was evident everywhere except within the AI industry itself. The rhetoric from many of the industry’s top leaders has been “this technology will eliminate millions of jobs, fundamentally reshape countless other jobs, and automate the use of lethal force, but we’re going to develop it anyways”. Many of the current economic woes, including mass layoffs, have been blamed on AI by the very executives conducting said…
I’m frankly more shocked that people in the industry are surprised the general public hates them. Like it’s been non-stop fear mongering and hype from them for years, AI has basically done nothing to improve the lives of normal people, wtf did they expect?
They didn't expect anything else and aren't surprised. "The X industry is discovering..." is one of those stock phrases that people just kinda deploy willy-nilly; the article contains no argument that anyone in the AI industry didn't know or didn't expect this.
Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it
#118I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…
The concern I hear the most (which I don't think is common among the general public) is the existential risk one (that an AI may be created that drastically exceeds human intelligence, and that it may accidentally be incentivized to take actions that destroy most or all of human civilization).
> concern I hear the most (which I don't think is common among the general public) is the existential risk one
Altman and friends' "stop us before we shoot grandma" PR tour in 2023 and '24 is largely the cause of this AI backlash. If you tell everyone you're building something that will kill us all, you will scare up investors. But you'll also turn the public against you. In truth, we have zero evidence of the alignment problem to date in the existential form. Instead, it's the usual technology enabling bad actors stuff.
Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it
#119The group that really hate AI are the media and journalists, which makes perfect sense given what generative AI is doing to those industries.
As it stands though the whole "the public hates AI" is about as credible as that phase from a decade ago where random tweets were used to justify any position they wanted to.
Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> housing crisis worsens as datacenters are build I take your other points, but I can't see the connection there. I've heard that they increase electricity rates in many cases (poorly managed electric utilities that can't build out grid capacity without raising rates for everyone), but not that they're affecting housing.
For The Netherlands, construction work causes emissions. There are limits to these emissions. Building a data center means you can't simultaneously build a house anywhere nearby the construction site as that would cause the local emissions to go over the set limits. Next to that there is net congestion. The energy grid is currently critical, if you add a data center that means you will not be able to connect 20 to 30…
Thanks for the perspective. It sounds like you'd run into the same issues (except for the electrical load) building any large industrial project, which does not bode well for your economy.