AI is still a tool for complex tasks. Reaching impactful everyday use for regular users will take time. It is not clear who they interviewed for this study. It would be good to see how people in specific industries feel about AI.
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
#42> Despite all of the skepticism, a whole lot of Americans also report using AI in their daily lives on an increasingly regular basis. About a quarter of Americans say they use AI chatbots on a daily basis. Those who do are typically using the chatbots for research purposes or for work, Pew says.
Yeah, we don't have a choice. These things were foisted upon us, and now we all just have to deal with it, so long as we want to keep being employed/employable.
Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society
#43imo the negative sentiment is less a practical response to AI specifically, and more an emotional response to digital technology in general.
Eg: i think my kids will likely be more comfortable, have more convenience, than me — but i worry a lot they will be more anxious and lonely.
I don’t personally believe this gets solved through regulation, religion, or self-discipline.
imo we just need technology products that drastically reduce the cost of things that make us less anxious and lonely
Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, they hope they are on such a path.
Yes but what evidence is there that they aren’t? To me, scaling laws and empirical benchmark trends along with high adoption (all of this together, not individually) strongly support this, and also coding agents have become load bearing so it’s sort of already happening I would say.
I think that's an optimistic take; the load bearing portion hasn't permeated traditional development.
Like so many things popular on HN, the tools that are here are great aids for good development processes and practitioners... but they are not actually replacing them in applications that will exist after the AI bubble deflates.
Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society
#45The pushback I see everywhere outside of tech suggests the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest. The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet as much as it likes to think it does.
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. That's larger than the US GDP (~$24T). You can only throw numbers like that around if you're explicitly aiming to replace labor, no matter how realistic it is.
Personally, I'm tired of mediocre people who've attained some amount of business success turning around and trying to dismantle democratic systems because it's incompatible with their world view.
It's more than reasonable to complain about these things night and day. The alternative to vocal complaints won't be pretty.
Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society
#46> 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…
Is Claude really that much better than all the others for normal use?
Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society
#47Because the writing is on the wall already. Who hasn't been annoyed with "AI customer service", we already read about AI in the military, then you have the envisioned huge loss of jobs. People generally seem to like using it as a chatbot, or answer questions, on their own terms. But anywhere it's been forced against the user asking for it has been a disaster.
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.
Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society
#48Half of Americans voters elected Trump. Most people are idiots, I wouldn’t use that as a gauge yet.
It's pretty telling that only 16% have a positive view on it, then. If even Trump has more than twice as high approval than your product, you've royally fucked up.
Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society
#49Because the writing is on the wall already. Who hasn't been annoyed with "AI customer service", we already read about AI in the military, then you have the envisioned huge loss of jobs. People generally seem to like using it as a chatbot, or answer questions, on their own terms. But anywhere it's been forced against the user asking for it has been a disaster.
I'm thinking it has more to do with the fascism of the oligarchs at this point. These are just thinwrappers over the failure of American democracy.
Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Frontier model companies aren’t banking on the general public “wanting” AI. They are on a path to a product that won’t need to be wanted because the entire economy will need it.
AI seems more like a feature than a product.
If you mean the technology diffuses into all products and processes instead of some standalone production that maybe makes sense to me but the models themselves feel like a product