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In the survey, 31% Americans believe AI will have an "equally positive and negative impact", and 13% are "not sure"; it's 16% pro 44% N/A 40% anti.
I wish the survey also included non-Americans, because from a 2025 survey (https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-aro...) people from other countries were less concerned; those from Israel and South Korea were more optimistic than pessimistic.
Notably, Pew did this survey 14 months ago and the results were better, but not by much: 17% pro 49% N/A 35% anti. They also did a survey in 2023, and already 50% of US respondents were "more concerned than excited" about AI, while only 10% were "more excited than concerned".
Blank | Negative | Positive | Equal | Not sure
Society | 40 | 16 | 31 | 13
Them, personally | 31 | 23 | 27 | 19
---
Probably as much a commentary on the fallacy that bad things won't happen to us, personally, as much as a commentary on AI. But I found the difference interesting.
They were worse.
We've all seen stories about performance evaluations that include "how much AI are you using?" We've all seen Microsoft shove it into the OS and even the physical keyboard. We've all had the little suggestions pop up in Gmail.
I don’t like “AI”, and I don’t use it. I read lots of stories where people are forced to use it at work but don’t use it otherwise. Do you know of people who don’t think “AI” will have a positive impact on society but still choose to use it?
Yes. Per your previous statement, those people who are “forced” to use it at work. While it might be a requirement of their job, what job they do is usually a choice.
This has absolutely nothing with stated vs revealed preference.
The loneliness epidemic, a constant drip-feed of outrage -- all so that people can make a small amount of money, distracted driving. Nearly every single service becoming worse over time, etc. Since then, the tech CEOs has been sidling up to the halls of power and effectively begging to help destroy privacy as thoroughly as possible.
I certainly know that my life was transformed for the worse by social media. 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. There is no successful social media company that actually cares about the negative impacts it has had on society. They speak about things such as "providing value" where value = time spent on the platform. They do not care if they ruin lives.
So a few years ago, nearly everywhere you went people are talking about how thoroughly AI was going to transform society. You couldn't go anywhere without hearing it. Of course people are wary. Big tech has been a net negative in very loud, intrusive, and obvious ways in _most_ people's lives. And now they're saying they're going to radically reform society.
The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal. For sure, if they really how the power to radically change everything, they would change it for the worse and would never spend a moment worrying about the damage they had done.
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 realistic outcome that actually benefits society as a whole. It all ends with very few obscenely rich people getting even more obscenely rich. But I guess we could tell an AI to put ourselves in the new Marvel movie to pass the time since we no longer have any jobs.
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 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.
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 Netflix, but I'm skeptical of the idea that the financial wellbeing of the average American has been improved by computers.
[1] - https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...
Not only is that exactly what happened, they weren't satisfied with accumulating most of the wealth produced by it, they've also taken it upon themselves to take over democracy and media and act like a state within a state. You only need one statistic to understand America today, that working class Americans without college degrees have had their purchasing power stagnate since the 1970s(https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/)
People who used to have good jobs can now drive for Doordash and what the last wave of digitalization did over 30 years the AI gurus now promise to do in 10 again, and not just to the working class. The only reason to be optimistic is that they're snake oil salesmen.
I want to be optimistic and agree with you, but I don't think the parallels are as strong as you say they are. We already have Anthropic withhold Mythos from the public, the governement now allowing the use of Fable, I don't think its farfetched to think that the US will start regulating access to Chinese/open-source models, pricing for compute isn't slowing down. The problem isn't AI, but who controls the compute that powers it.
It's already happening right now, still in relatively mundane ways, but there's so much to do.
If AI becomes a primary catalyst for advancement it further moves the needle in the monetary direction.
That redfines advancement to mean something different than what is beneficial to society to be what is monetarily best for the owners of said advancment.
Sure, the transformer is great for making larger neural networks with better learning potential, which are improving protein folding models a fair bit. But do we need the combined budget of the Apollo program or interstate highway system (adjusted for inflation) per year, to develop better molecular simulation models? (no, the most advanced ones run on mundane hardware and trained just fine on pre 2020 infrastructure).
So while it's true that; "AI" ((primarily) Neural network based deep learning techniques) are wonderful tools to make society better; slop generators absorbing the entire energy budget of a few small nations to generate infinite propaganda, linked-in posts and shrimp Jesus is only tangentially helping in that goal while destabilization civilization in the process.
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 patent expired, for example.
Who is exactly going to benefit here because Americans have been given a rotten deal by neoliberalism for the last 40 years.
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?
The most optimistic answer I can think of is that they will eventually agree to share their wealth under credible threats of violent revolution. That's the most optimistic outcome I see, they concede to threats of violence rather than needing actual violence.
But those problems need solved first before completely upending the current system. The system does need changed, but that change must happen before mass unemployment, not after the fact.
The other question, of course, is what happens to the political power of the newly disposable?
Do I think that's likely? No, but mostly because it would require parallel uprising of the global working class, which doesn't seem to materialize.
* Use AI to eliminate all white collar jobs.
* Combine AI with robotics to eliminate all blue collar jobs.
* Combine AI with military hardware to kill any rabble who may become threats to the ruling class.
The most optimistic outcome is that it doesn't happen in our lifetimes. Aside from that, the best you can hope for is that the ruling class enslaves the rest but treats them well enough that most don't realize they are slaves (e.g., the Eloi from the Time Machine).
I'm cautiously optimistic about the former, but I expect the resources required by the latter will far exceed what the greed inherent to the ruling class will allow without first purging a significant fraction of the population. All we can hope for is they stop the purge before it takes everyone not in the ruling class, but given how many ultra-wealthy individuals already see the rest of us, I wouldn't bet on that.
Ok, you didn’t need to laugh that hard.
That allows really powerful local-first AI applications, rather than being beholden to AI providers. With the advance of coding agents, anyone can build their own applications.
The downstream effects of widespread local AIs is a rise in AI slop that feeds the distraction machine and attention economy as well as surveillance. I don't know what the solution to those is, but the local experience is going to be powerful.
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 critical. Tech companies continue to profit from the status quo and we need courageous people who disrupt that.
I don't think that's the case. The people running these companies certainly aren't good people and everyone else in any position of power is either happy to hurt anyone and anything in exchange for a paycheck, or they're willing to take the money and turn a blind eye to the things they know are wrong. It's difficult to know where people stop being complicit. The amazon warehouse employee who is forced to piss in bottles or wear diapers to keep their job isn't really the problem, and I'm sure many of them hate the company they work for, but the company only works because of their efforts.
Agreed that power nearly always corrupts. It does so in often subtle and slow shifts. In general we have a paucity of leaders who wield their power on behalf of the oppressed.
The truth is that the "bad" leaders need powerful help. They need someone to come alongside them and love them into the light of the damage they've caused by drifting into complacency. And I'm not talking about "nice" love here, it might initially look more like shame.
One of the most important political developments in history was the realization that you can’t just replace a bad king with a good king. They all eventually go bad. Instead you need checks and balances to distribute power and make sure it’s not concentrated in only a few hands.
That is an heavy understatement. After reading some biographies and books about the tech elite… it's just much weirder and sickly than i ever imagined. Strange cults, religions and beliefs. Surprisingly high stupidity mixed with intense hate of humans. Straight up anti-social anti-human behaviour… and drugs, so much drugs that lead to psychosis. Narcissism and superiority… you would have hard time finding anyone moderately nice to hang out with. It's a real curse that the system pushes up people like this.
But with powerful AI models the philosophical and moral and religious questions have become impossible to ignore.
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.
Likely true in many cases!
> there is no evil emerging in big systems
That's a very definitive statement!
What brings you to the conclusion that there aren't forces at play that we don't yet have a good name for or don't yet have the scientific means to study?
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 is that the way we distribute information about the world has a deep negativity bias. This exists because the information economy is supported by advertisement, which requires attention to profit, and attention is easiest to attract with negativity. "If it bleeds, it leads" has been true forever.
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.
This. Many of us are cogs in these machines doing the harm...to ourselves and others around us.
The thing is, these companies can't exist without employees. But employees need the companies for money to pay the other companies.
This aspect isn't talked about enough. We discuss plenty the direct impact of social media on its users, but little about how it effects even those who don't use social media at all, by proxy. Little is said how it's impossible to escape being profiled and having shadow profiles on these products just by virtue of everyone else in your life around you using them.
That's a huge problem. There is no possible way to opt out, at all.
Not so fast. Violent crime has been declining for about 30 years. Tech has been ascendant in that time.
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 places beyond the bounds of ten or so websites/apps of the Internet are still vastly influenced by them even when they reach outside. And despite that it would only take a handful of people "defecting" to form a nice tightly knit community, it's hard to find that many people with a common thread tying them together that aren't afflicted with behavior influenced by social media.
I don't want to just have places on the Internet that are actually "secretly" kind of like offshoots of Twitter/Reddit/Discord communities. That's almost not better and yet it's what a lot of attempts at "hey we're doing forums again" tends to feel like.
Unfortunately that’s not quite as easy for people in creative professions that must now use social media to promote themselves and their work.
I will never forget Ruchi Sanghvi’s remarks at the Female Founders Conference talk in 2015[0]:
> It [the News Feed] became this virtuous cycle that we all dream of: consumption and production that just kept on giving. […] Even though everyone said they hated it, engagement had doubled.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01FjJyBAOUE#t=6m29s
I think that should read "all so that a very small number of people can make a very large amount of money"
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.
I say this as someone highly critical of social media. I'm not sure you can entirely blame Social Media for this. The fact is, outrageous things are happening constantly throughout the world. We just didn't hear about most of it before Internet connectivity and the reach of social media. It's not like social media suddenly created outrage. It's just informing people about the existing absolutely outrageous things happening. Are the algorithms tuned for outrage? Sure. But that doesn't mean these outrageous things are not happening.
Back in the 1960s there was widespread outrage over the Vietnam war, but no social media drip to blame it on. The difference was: The outrageous acts were getting press and constant attention, through non social media channels.
You can either be 1. ignorant / not paying attention to the state of the world, 2. paying attention but deliberately ignoring the state of the world, or 3. outraged all the time.
I'm not saying it is good to be outraged, but that's our world. The state of the world is absolutely outrageous, and a normal human being should be feeling outrage at what is constantly being done.
Everyone knows it's just another stake in the coffin.
Anecdotally, my optimist and disappointment has a lot less to do with flaws in the technology, versus outcomes that rested on the social / political / power-dynamic side of things.
For example, instead of everyone being able to command the digital factory of capital-equipment on their desk (or in their palm) to pursue their personal interests and welfare, the devices feel like tools of someone else who considers you a resource to be exploited, and they can command people to beat you up if you use "your" property "wrong".
To cast things out in a future-direction, imagine being excited about the dawn of practical spaceships, and the disappoint when--somehow--there are no limits on launch pollution, monopolies abound, and the average migrant to cleaner worlds must enter into multi-generational indentured servitude.
You can't get stuck in life being disappointed in average people. You have to seek out good people. And good places and good things.
Or stay in the cranky cynic rabbit hole. God knows there are unlimited amounts of other cranky people to back you up. Maybe even the majority?
Yet i guess it's here to stay and AI needs us, our human content to stay relevant and thrive. Personally, I think it should pay all of us (set up some system or systems) for every piece of content we create daily & choose to publish. THat way we all thrive for keeping it relevant and it thrives alongside us. Wrote about one idea / a system that would get us paid for the daily content we produce via living each day https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...
But, again I'd be happy if all of society and cultures unplugged it!
you're romanticizing the past
*Or rampant or whatever other word you feel fits the current state of social media.
Because there was no faster way to do it, it was okay to wait for someone to send you those photos via email. If you were late for a meetup somewhere new, that was okay because people knew you might have missed the street a few times stopped for directions etc.
We have more convenient things, sure. But they come with increased and rather frenzied expectations.
It's not a requirement or law of nature that every technology sold must be used against the customer, we just haven't reached a point where we say enough is enough and outlaw such consumer hostile practices. Instead we've been allowing the corporations who seek to screw us over at every opportunity to gain more and more influence over the governments that could constrain them making it harder for us to fight back against the abuses we're subjected to.
Convenience is the glue that got all the frogs stuck to their boiling pots.
> the technology we have now has saved hundreds of millions
Oh wow, are you sure it's not billions?
The Internet of the 90s and early 2000s was amazing. The Internet today is a dumpster fire of attention hoarding, regurgitated content and, now, slop.
Society as a whole may be better off without a lot of the convenience features we have, but I also don't agree that it's all or nothing. We could have an amazing tech relationship today. But a select few wanted to monetize it for themselves. Here we are, welcome to the free market.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/03/going-analog-gen-z-desire-to...
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.
My heat pump died the other day and I called an HVAC place and got an AI agent, which was frustrating and not helpful. So I called a different HVAC place and spoke to someone who could actually help, then I gave them lots of money.
I called siriusxm to get them to turn off their stupid advertising on my in-car infotainment
I had called like 3 months ago to do the same thing. The human agent confirmed she turned it off on my account
I called again recently and asked the AI to turn off in-car ads and weather alerts. The ai INSISTED this was my car's manufacturer responsibility.
I kept yelling and swearing until it finally transferred me to a human. The human confirmed that it was a part of sirius AND that the feature was disabled (it turns out that disabled features on inactive accounts automatically become re-active on 'free weekends'. Holy fuck that seems illegal. the only way to disable features during free weekends is to have an active account (aka paying them)).
My next car is going to be seriously driven by a lack of connectivity, lack of sirirusxm. I'll buy a car where someone already figured out how to physically remove the radio
1. Most customers seeking support could solve their problem easily through self-service methods.
2. Some customers are running into edge cases that truly need a human to solve, and they should be able to get access to a human.
3. Making a human easy to get to results in a lot of people who are actually in group 1 but think they're in group 2 costing a lot of money in support staffing costs.
The anecdote I like to give is from my brother previously working at XBox Live support. 80% of his calls were password reset requests, something everyone could easily self-service right from the login page. These weren't "I tried that but I don't have access to the e-mail address I used anymore" cases[0], but the simple case. He'd trigger the password reset e-mail, the user would see the e-mail, and go through the reset flow. These users did not need a human, but were convinced they did, despite there literally being a "Forgot password?" button/link on every login page.
My other personal anecdote is overhearing my father-in-law calling up his cable company to pay his bill, something that's easier and faster to do online, but for some reason he'd rather talk to a human.
I get it though, sometimes you really DO need a human, but how do you make it easy to get a human when you need one without making it too easy to get one when you really and truly don't?
[0] Those DID happen, but were exceptionally rare, and a significant number of those calls were probably people trying to break into someone else's account.
It absolutely has a place in the system - but that place (in the companies that do it well) starts by giving call center employees access to the AI as a fallback when they don't know an answer and reduces the amount of information and product specialization needed. Assuming it is ranked highly by internal teams then you can consider shifting it from being an internal tool to one exposed externally - instead, in a lot of cases, companies have just switched off the ability to dial in without going through the AI hoops and, in the worst cases, if there's a tech issue where the call center disconnects from the customer, the customer is forced to go through all those hoops again.
I like to emphasize that AI is a tool - it can be applied well in a considered and thoughtful manner - or it can be rolled out to every conceivable usage with reckless abandon... we're in a place where number two is the dominant approach.
I find LLM customer service to be better than the historic dumber stuff. In those you can usually say "I want to talk to a human" and it will escalate. The customer service bots of yore were far dumber and made it harder to escalate.
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 different than it is.
Part of the reason why humans are rejecting AI is that we are putting it in places where it makes no sense, or places where humans prefer a human in the loop, there are plenty of places where machine learning algorithms make sense, but customer service is not one of them.
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 does lose time predictability.
So if your problem with AI is accuracy, then in theory your problem is just premature stopping.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_algorithm
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.
The computer should be a force for order, because being a living creature is chaos.
That said LLMs can be used in ways that promote order. People just got excited and wanted to believe they could be trusted in chaos mode.
For reference chaos mode would be prompting something like: "Look at my journal entries and tell me what I should do to fix my life". Versus using one to build a table of common themes and analyzing the resulting spreadsheet yourself.
The reality (as far as I can comprehend it) seems to be that AI expanded the scope of what we can shove into one mouthful, and now it takes much more effort to chew. Metaphorically speaking.
People aren't fully deterministic either.
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 defined and it never prematurely stops, the question changes from "will the output be correct" to "when will it be done?"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_algorithm
Ah, so it's merely functionally useless, if not theoretically.
Also, the better one gets at using AI, the better they can predict where AI might fail.
This allows you to both work 10x faster and prevent many mistakes, which puts you far ahead of not-using-AI.
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.
Good AI system design can help somewhat, but even if you give the LLM a calculator tool, it's not guaranteed to use it every time, or to write the tool use correctly, or to copy out the answer correctly.
You're optimising for quality, where as companies optimise for some balance of quality and cost.
AI might not be quite as good as a skilled human, but it's often good enough and a lot cheaper, so companies use it.
I actually think customer service is one of the few places it makes sense to use AI – at least to some degree. AI can provide immediate support to customer queries, and can usually handle the majority of basic issues customers have. You might need to escalate to a human in edge cases, but that's how you balance quality and cost.
How could we not take this shot? I understand perfectly well that a lot of things will need reconfiguration and that it's going to be painful, but dear lord, let's focus on making it go well instead of ending it.
Software is deterministic, it has been since its inception[0]. Why go from something objective/provable to something that does "strange things", when we already have former? It's like making bricks out of paper and declaring "actually, this is logical next step for bricks because stuff waves in the wind".
> What if our lives get much, much better?
What if not?
[0] (Yes not really/actually if we're being pedantic)
Because we like computers to feel like they are fast, mainly. Most compilers, for example, are non-deterministic because they can be made to run faster if they ignore things like thread execution order. Same goes for LLMs. Technically they are as deterministic as any other software, but we allow GPUs to play fast and loose with floating point numbers to speed things up, which gives the impression of "strange things".
As long as you are not (and I sympathize) I have zero clue how to justify any delay in getting everyone at least to our current level.
I understand that there are risks and we should work hard to guard against them. But no society has seriously considered giving up driving while we figure out global warming. People want a good life, that's just the selfish fucks we are, and it's upon those with clout to will it for everyone.
> Why go from something objective/provable to something that does "strange things", when we already have former?
Because it does something different. It's not from/to. LLMs are subbing in for humans, not for deterministic computing. Replacing deterministic computing with LLMs for tasks that have be perfectly solved without LLMs would be wasteful and silly.
I'm a bit joking, but we've been working in deterministic computation for so long, we don't even think of there being another way.
But seriously, I do view AI as the input to a deterministic machine. Junior engineers (well all engineers) aren't deterministic, and we've made processes to direct their behavior towards making better software. AI agents do a better job of following my processes than engineers. We move up the stack towards testing and verification rather than writing. That doesn't make me sad, after 40 years of coding, I'm kind of tired of it. I have more ideas than I can code, so I'm happy to give AI my ideas and have it code for me.
I had a former manager tell me that all technology problems are really people problems, now maybe all technology problems are all agent problems and we just have to get comfortable with managing agents like we got comfortable with managing people.
How exactly do you think this is going to happen?
I am not saying it's going to work but we are not getting much smarter right now, and we really need all the help we can get to accelerate more complicated stuff.
And it is accelerating! Will it be as useful as I hope it will be? That is entirely beside the point. This post was not at all about me assigning any chance of the good outcome. Just that there is no other ethical option.
At a quantum level, it is also actually non-deterministic.
This is satire, right?
If you seriously think that AI is going to improve the lives of anyone except the robber barons who own the AI you are absolutely delusional.
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.
How much of this is due to AI vs. the government and corporate structures in society? (Saw elsewhere that Chinese people were also much more optimistic)
Especially when you see what big tech spends on LLMs per year while Americans lack medicare for all, universal childcare, or free community college.
People have long hated the leadership of big tech well before ChatGPT, let's not act like this is all new and shocking. More like the naked power grabs are filling people with righteous digust.
Instead for many western countries, chiefly The USA, You have a society that very blatantly is restructuring itself to service capital holders and not the population. These Governments are not aligned with their people, and are instead trying to solidify Stratified Economies where the entire engine of the country moves in service of its rich.
If the promise of AI is to provide intellectual labor in exchange for capital, the population loses its only remaining middle class made up of knowledge-workers which still hold a semblance of political power. If the middle collapses like this, the only means of social mobility will become high-risk gambles or crime.
it seems like Chinese people have much more faith in their govt than Western countries, and subsequently trust them more in distributing the benefits of AI (in aggregate ofc)
but you know why that is right (really hoping you know the difference and where this comes from and its not culture)
polls are often done in a way to prove their own biases
if they were taken serious then what we are allowed to say or not would change drastically and political correctness would be laughed out of the room.
Hiring an engineer to finetooth comb blueprints for mistakes before construction will take nearly as much time as having an engineer draft them themselves. And they will be smart enough to not do something silly like putting the electrical panel on the back of the shower wall. If you just vibecode some blueprints and start construction without the comb you could lose way more than you saved with something as simple as pouring a support pillar or building a wall 2 inches off and having to tear it out later and rebuild.
Whether the value attached to these companies is grounded in reality is a different question.
It's passed person to person over long periods of time.
And you can't train an LLM on that.
I think the trouble, economically speaking, is that while it will be possible from a purely technical standpoint to unbundle a job performed by a human into separate tasks, many of which can be "done" by agents, the new process will not present a cost savings overall once the entire lifecycle of the task is taken into account. The economist David Autor has written about these challenges extensively, and his theory accords with my experiences.
Any economic model that I've seen leads to failure. The only reason it's popular now is that numbers are going up. People are just edging it.
Capital is simply going from bubble to bubble to pop. It was NFTs and Web3, then the metaverse, now it's AI. You need a new speculative product, market demand be damned. Ultimately the tech itself is inconsequential. Sure, AI is somehow more useful than an hashed png picture of a monkey smoking a joint, but the AI frenzy would've happened anyway.
I can imagine some other alternate universe where it's the turn of something already commonplace instead, like cloud computing; and the same CEOs who are screaming right now that we need to burn the ecosystem to build their new AI data centers would've told us that "The Cloud is inevitable", and that we need to spend 80% of the GDP to finance their AWS competitors.
- consider that right now autonomous drones operate in Ukraine using the latest and greatest frontier models
- consider that fascist or authoritarian governments will now have a kind of access to their citizenry’s deeply personal lives that they’ve only dreamed about before. “Show me everyone who has insulted me” is now feasible to do at scale, today. A system that can monitor, in real time, a global sigint network on every single person equivalent or better than having a dedicated person or team of people monitoring them. Every home has microphones, every square inch of street has satellite imagery, security cameras, etc.
Now, given today where we are: what do we do? Do we regulate ourselves into a situation where people feel better about things like data center construction but that impact our ability to compete, ceding these technologies to other countries that would gain an incredible amount of leverage and power over us? Do we continue unabated, damaging communities and industries in a fervor to be at the top that later down the road we realize is not worth the tradeoff?
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.
I honestly don't think writers have much of a say regarding what they write. The tone is set top down.
But given that most people hate AI it's a polarizing topic to write about, they have incentives to poor some oil, for sure.
Fine by me, AI is an anti-human technology.
You should change the world by playing chess, not creating a new game and shitting on everyone playing the old one.
My only objective is doing damage it to it before it kills our pensions and 401k's etc.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4921196/#:~:text=A%...
That sounds literally insane to me. This is not coming from the media, many of the same people that own the media have a vested interest in this particular US political administration... which is also basically all of big tech.
>The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet
Of course they don't, but they are still allowed to make a product, and pivot if there's no consumer demand. However there is huge consumer and business demand for AI so they are justified in making the investments they are.
It is not ok to lobby and manipulate governments for fiscal policy changes to write off the costs and risks on the general public.
We MUST be entirely insulated from their failure as society. If they can't raise the capital for the product then they should fail quietly and insignificantly which is not what is going to happen at the moment.
>It is not ok to lobby and manipulate governments for fiscal policy changes to write off the costs and risks on the general public.
How are they doing this? What are you referring to?
Right now they have to lobby and manipulate the government just to keep from being shut down on a mad king's whim. A mad king elected and re-elected by the same morons who now demand a say in how AI is built and used. No, thanks.
Government is not the solution. Government is the problem. The Republicans told us that, and they were right, just not in the way they meant.
Citation needed. Most people use it once a while but not daily; they tried it once and played a bit with it but then forgot about it because it’s not clear what they should use it for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites
This is very basic in technology products.
It is very easy to say that Gmail AI product has 1.8 Billion users because there are about 1.8 Billion Gmail accounts/users and they have absolutely no way of completely opting out. (opting out without the company punishing users by taking away important features)
A simple A/B Test with just 50,000 or 100,000 users depending on the product will give everyone the REAL picture of where users stand.
You should consider that the industry is just lying to make everyone believe that everyone else is interested. Creating a sense of inevitability. It's the same trick that every ad out there uses, selling you a profitable fantasy as reality.
There’s very clearly a Substack of putting everyone out of work, reducing the power of labor, so a few can profit.
So it doesn't surprise me that people are predisposed to not like this particular new tech.
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.
> 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 public still think AI is junk.
Update: here's the underlying report: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an...
The question there was "% of U.S. adults who say they ever use the following AI chatbots", so it's not a measure of overall usage, just exposure. Not surprising Gemini and Grok and MetaAI rank higher then.
By comparison, all the rest of the tools non-programmers get exposure to are floundering around trying to be everything to everyone. It's a push not a pull.
The rest of the pack, when given everyday real-world computing tasks, for people that don't know what a terminal is, just suck. (e.g. "copilot, fix the spacing issue in this word document" or literally any apple genmoji attempt with more than two basic english words)
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.
What everyone glosses over is that it really sucked for the workers that lived thru it. Highly skilled jobs like weaving became obsolete and the low-skill factory work that replaced it, paid little more than a starvation wage.
Claude has been quite helpful in reviewing my investments, and I have made a fair amount of money on his advice. His availability is unparalleled compared to any sort of financial planner.
Professionally, I have run my programs and scripts through Copilot/OpenAI and sometimes received caustic and fiery criticism, but others praise with helpful suggestions. Oftentimes it does make fundamental mistakes.
The threats of the end of the white collar class are not unduely worrying to me, as my retirement is close. Still, the whole of the culture is begin driven neurotic.
My answers to this question are personal, and atypical. Perhaps there will be general good in this somewhere, though it may be hard to see.
Just out of curiosity, what are some investment moves that you made as a result of Claude's advice?
"In a bull market, everyone's a genius."
He really laid out the case for alternate funds in real estate and mortgage securities, with a bit more precious metals.
I really didn't want to lose the gains I have made over the last year, and I think this will do it.
The boss of the main private TV channel in France famously said in 90s that his job consisted in “selling brain time to advertisers”. What was handicraft has been turned into a mass extraction business by the Google and Facebook of our world. AI is the cherry on the cake, really.
So hurray for ignoring the majority of people. I’m glad people can offer other people services in a generally neutral way without needing to pass a committee.
Also wrong, gay marriage had 60% support before Obergefell v. Hodges.
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
https://economicprinciples.org/Why-and-How-Capitalism-Needs-...
At the core, this is what the pessimism is about. If AI replicates the advent of personal computers and the Internet, our society will look more like India where everyone has technology but only 5-10% of people live really well
Sure, only 16% of Americans think AI will have a positive impact. But if you ask if they believe smart phone, social media, metaverse, crypto, etc will have a positive impact I highly doubt you'll get a much bigger number.
Is something a net benefit if everything is cheaper and cancer is cured, but you have no job?
I'm surprised how much people downvoted this comment. It acknowledges the upsides and downsides and doesn't say which is greater. It acknowledges that some people will have some very negative impacts. I guess if you think it's all good or all bad, then you would disagree with my open minded take...
I don't think it's AI. I think it's the apathetic voterbase finally waking up to just how much tax dodging is going on.
The fact it's being pushed on all of us as this panacea for the cost of human effort is just disgusting, even if the technology is truly impressive.
Every company salivated at the thought of using AI to enrich themselves, but not a single thought seems to have been given to the human element of it all.
Capitalism approval rates in the US is much more favorable than 16%.
I suppose my comment should've said "views on AI aren't solely views on AI, they are views on AI as it intersects with capitalism"
You’re right that the AI opinions are largely colored by the business practices around it.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/694835/image-capitalism-slips.a...
I was absolutely blown away by Stable Diffusion and that AI could generate images, now I'm kind of disgusted with it. We've been flooded with low artistic value output and people are having a natural reaction to that.
But yes, there is so so much slop as well
We are bouldering towards the total collapse of society. To me, it's like 10,000 people want to rule the post-apocalyptic world (Fallout style) where asking "maybe we shouldn't have the apocalypse?" is heresy.
Is it really 'want', or is it FOMO?
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.
I tried to use claude for a completely menial task yesterday, adding some resistant-starch foods to my diet, and it was worse than useless. Actively wasting my time with claims that buckled as soon as I questioned them and completely falsified citations from product pages that it recommended.
If you are branding your product as "AI" when these word salad spitters are still dominating headlines, you deserve all the headwinds coming to you.
It might be difficult to make models that have useful, high intelligence, but also are very biased. It could create a sort of grounding in logic and reality.
Grok might actually be early evidence of this. Despite the bad press it gets, it's really not so bad.
One can always hope ...
Make no mistake: I am as much perpetrator as victim. While I am having even days off of my smartphone and never use it during driving, I am at least as much affected and addicted as most of us.
Now we have dystopian warehouses and cars driving all over.
We get more, but we do less.
We interact with more of the world, but we interact with people less.
It makes us unhappy.
Marshmallows are pretty tasty, I guess.
It's gotten worse from there. The "dark enlightenment." Flirting with fascism. Creating the biggest meme stocks in history and promoting that as accomplishment. You're not fooling enough people. We might not be in your face about it, but we know you're not good people.
I think that AI is a great way to sum our collective will. Better than representation by ambitious businessmen.
This is awkward because the immense progress of the last 250 years has mostly come from such technology. Yet few people are aware of this.
I hope we can continue to progress by eliminating jobs, but the current backlash is probably the biggest I've seen in my life.
What backlash was there to the computer?
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 risk of voting for an unpredictable speed demon.
50% of the S&P 500 valuation is now directly related to AI as are 40% of new layoffs.
A quote often attributed to Stalin/Lenin/Marx is something like, "Capitalists will sell the rope to be used to hang them".
AI is taking this even further. Corps are effectively borrowing tons of money in order to build the rope to hang the middle class --- to be followed by hanging themselves.
The idea that you can lay off the middle class and business will continue as usual is a capitalistic fantasy. Without jobs, people can't afford to buy products built with AI.
AI wouldn't lie to you --- would it?
- half of everyone is below average.
- americans, unbelievably, voted to re-elect Trump.
The fact that 16 percent of americans are short-sited, ignorant and speak in contradiction to their best interests should surprise no one.
I cannot get a specialist without referrals and endless appointments to spend more than 30min to discuss how to fix a serious issues. Claude? Hours and hours of back and forth. Public models now beat the specialized ones like OpenEvidence. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04431-5
Diagnostics is getting blown apart by AI, the best cancer screening will be available in even remote corners of this world.
We were constrained by the available brain mass of highly trained specialists - and this bottleneck is getting removed.
Hard not to be optimistic on AI if you're in healthcare.
In the meantime, AI has given scientists 20 years of incredible tools, from which we now reap the fruits in our daily lives
The most lucrative uses should be in fintec, just by the shear volumes of cash there
They did fully autonomous tests in 2022 through 2024. Something like everything in a 5km radius was dead. Various sources in mainstream media online about this now.
The overall greater good of humanity matters more than anything else.
On the other side, you don't see a similar upswell in support from the right. AI companies are from San Francisco, and their CEOs are weird, awkward, and probably gay abortion lovers.