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armchairhacker
qwertygnu
> % of U.S. adults who say they think the impact of AI on __ over the next 20 years will be positive or negative
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.
holistio
> the results were better
They were worse.
silisili
Because 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.
rozap
Very true. I work for an AI company, I use it every day, it's a huge value add for certain problems.
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.
avdelazeri
Similarly, I'm a grad school student studying AI (well, computer vision). When I called my internet provider to complain and ask for maintenance (a fool with a tall truck ran on our street and tore some of the cables) I could only get annoying AIs to talk with me. They kept arguing that my service was working properly despite the snapped cables. I reckon that the AI assistants were hallucinating the answer to a ping or something like that. I found another provider who actually gave me the option to talk with an actual human being and switched in the same day.
odo1242
Similarly: was calling apartments to ask about them / schedule a tour before I moved in, rejected the second best option specifically because they only had AI agents on the phone
fusslo
I had an AI agent lie to me
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
bean469
> I called siriusxm to get them to turn off their stupid advertising on my in-car infotainment
I know that ads on radio always were and still are a thing, but on actual screens as well? This just gives another reason not to upgrade from my 2010 car.
fusslo
YES. it's absurd
The screen on my car displays navigation, climate/AC, & carplay. There is a pop-up dialog box that takes over the display and says either "special offer from sirius xm" or "Warning: extreme weather X miles away". The background of the popup is opaque so it blocks out the ENTIRE screen
I can't access navigation, radio, or climate controls until I dismiss the pop ups!
AND pop ups stack. I have a video in my phone of pressing 'dismiss' 23 times in a row before I am able to get back to navigation.
Imagine driving through a thunderstorm in an unfamiliar city and you have to dismiss 1-3 popups per mile to just see the map!
K0nserv
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.
Sohcahtoa82
Three things are true:
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.
Telaneo
> 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've had the same thing happen with my grandma. 'You know you can do X online [on a website she already uses for some other reasons]? - I don't want to do it that way.' If I start probing for an answer, she doesn't respond with anything tangible (she does in other cases, so it's not like she's incapable of explaining the problem at hand).
The only thing I can conclude with is that they either A.) want to do it the way it's always been done (applicable in some cases), or 2.) They want to do it the hard way. They somehow don't care that it takes 7 times the time and effort to do it whatever way they've figured out. Never mind that they're paying double the insurance rate they need to. They're fine with that. They're not fine with switching, since that will introduce change.
There's one case that sticks out in my mind that really was like this. I think it's a close relative of a whole family problems in IT along the lines of 'user has a 27 step process to convert a .docx to a PDF, which involves a printer, a scanner, a website, and probably more, and they also don't want to just 'export to PDF', since they're fine with the way their process works'. Most people seem to be happy to make processes like that more efficient, especially if they're done regularly. Others treat them like rituals, where nothing can change.
munk-a
I think the key issue here is that the people deciding how long the escalation path is isn't the humans (a fair few people do opt into search company FAQs for their answer before dialing a hotline - you're robbing those people in particular of their time by forcing them back through the same FAQ steps and discouraging the usage of those opt-in low cost resources) and, right now, consumer protection and rights are at an all time low so a fair number of AI rollouts have been downright customer malicious.
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.
jon-wood
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.
K0nserv
I don't doubt that's true for everyone who reads HN, but having seen the other side there are loads of people who don't make the effort and could've found their own answer in the knowledge base.
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.
randycupertino
Also the AI chat just straight up lies to you and is flat out wrong. When I landed in Peru and was trying to get my phone working, verizon AI told me my account had international calling set up and was working fine but when I finally got to a human they were like "oh I see what the problem is your account doesn't have that option activated, let me add it for you right now." It was a huge stressor as I was there for various meetings and couldn't call my contacts or use my phone! Trying to use the stupid AI agent wasted 2 hours of my jet-lagged time it was so miserable trying to get through to a human who could help me.
peab
> Who hasn't been annoyed with "AI customer service", who hasn't been annoyed with "customer service", period
dimgl
It's not envisioned. There have been mass layoffs and a lot has been pinned on AI, even if it's true or not.
munk-a
It's kind of hilarious, and a pretty obvious externality, most of these layoffs are clearly just restructuring that the companies want an excuse for but by labeling them as modernization and AI driven they've caused a major image problem for AI for the one thing it hasn't actually done much of (outside of really stupid companies - like the ones that fired their whole teams and moved their workforce to India as soon as they heard how cheap the labor was there).
Simulacra
I hate the AI customer service, from drive thru to call center AI complete with fake background sounds, I hate it all. As a customer I find it insulting.
aix1
Then why do you keep giving them your business? Have things gotten so bad where you live that there are no companies left who would treat you with respect?
blindhippo
In many cases - yes, they have gotten that bad. It's pure fantasy that we live in a free market - there are a handful of companies that own nearly everything, there is very little customer choice or power to "speak with your money".
I do agree though - if one doesn't like the way a company does business, do whatever you can to avoid giving them yours.
cyanydeez
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.
everdrive
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 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.
slg
>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 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.
rayiner
> 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 models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors.
boothby
> 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.
rurp
You could say that about any big tech product and yet we've all seen power and wealth become concentrated on an incredible scale since the 60s. The immense resources needed to train frontier models gives the few companies that can manage it more of a moat than most tech products. So empirically I expect that we'll see the current wealth hording keep going at at least the same rate.
slg
>It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing.
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...
Barrin92
>It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. It doesn’t make any sense.
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.
singpolyma3
I mean. From a financial PoV that's exactly what happened
wyre
The 60s were 60 years ago. There were regulations back then that protected the common folk and capitalism wasn't as ruthless and aligned with the will of the 0.1% as it is now.
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.
svara
I'm legit pretty excited about applying AI to accelerate biological and medical discovery.
It's already happening right now, still in relatively mundane ways, but there's so much to do.
slg
How much of American society will get to share in the benefits of those new biological and medical discoveries when we don't have any health insurance because we lost our jobs to AI?
hattmall
The problem is, at least in theory, that it entirely changes the calculus of how advancements take place. In the past, when the pace of advancement was stronger the primary factor was the cultivation of a culture that valued prestige and knowledge over monetary gains. It didn't really matter how much money you threw at a problem because the bulk of the people responsible for advancements weren't interested in obscene wealth. Obviously those people were well compensated but any number of entities could provide that compensation. It was about bringing prestige to your lab / school / town or even country.
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.
an0malous
I don’t understand this logic, what would LLMs do here? Is thinking the bottleneck, or money to go and test all the ideas people have already thought of? Are we really missing the cure for cancer because we just haven’t thought about it enough and letting an LLM churn on all the data will figure it out? All the research is probably in its training set already, so why hasn’t it come up with the cure?
aDyslecticCrow
Yes, that's very nice. But that's very different models from LLMs and slop image generators. AI as a term has been butchered beyond recognition; when mentioning the current harm of AI investor hype and job automation, people are talking about generative models using LLMs or prompt based input, which have seen little to no use in "accelerate biological and medical discovery"
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.
pydry
I don't think that is realistic. But, it can write your child's essay for them.
ceejayoz
But someone has to be able to buy the results, right?
duncangh
I fear that at this rate the oligarchs will use medical breakthroughs to keep us alive and laboring against our and nature’s will like what industrial farming has done to chickens and other livestock
toomuchtodo
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 patent expired, for example.
ctoth
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?
slg
Who do you think will be answering these questions in a future in which these AI companies visions become a reality? Because they already have a huge influence on society and that will only increase as the tech improves.
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.
kemps4
These are the right questions to ask. I think about stuff like this often, and just as often people I discuss this with think I'm off my rocker. I, on the other hand, think some can't see past what they have been programmed to see. It's sad really, our lives are finite and much is wasted on a less than optimal layout.
thewebguyd
I'd answer: No, we should not have to work to eat, they should not be mandatory, and no not everyone has to work.
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.
undefined
jimbokun
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?
ori_b
Maybe figure out the answers to that before forcing everyone into an economy where they still need to work to make money, but any worthwhile jobs have been automated away.
The other question, of course, is what happens to the political power of the newly disposable?
thatmf
No, but what are the odds of the robust welfare state that would be required to actually enable some sort of post-work society taking shape here in America? I'd truly like to be optimistic but, politically we have been moving in the opposite direction ever since the end of the New Deal, and the oligarchs who control the technologies are not exactly benevolent.
vrganj
No. But capitalism requires them. I'm down to end capitalism, but maybe we should figure that out before we destroy the thing that kinda-sorta made it work?
hobofan
Most optimistic outcome: Hardware & software advances keep pace; Open weights & locally runnable models keep pace with frontier (at least the open weights part seems to hold), making AI advances widely available to anyone; Individual productivity skyrockets, having knock-on effects in most industries, slowly allowing less and less people to do the work required to maintain the basic needs of our civilization(s); UBI utopia achieved.
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.
atmavatar
If they're right:
* 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.
jimbokun
Well the most optimistic outcome is that our democratically elected representatives start acting in the interests of all they represent, not just those with a lot of money.
Ok, you didn’t need to laugh that hard.
titzer
One not-so-bad outcome would be that open weight models get better, smaller, more efficient, and easier to use while hardware gets faster, more efficient, and more widespread. Imagine when mobile CPUs have the GPU/NPU power of today's discrete GPUs and models are smaller and faster than today's models.
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.
expedition32
Now you are fired by a computer not a completely disinterested person! Progress.
Rekindle8090
[dead]
jondlm
This... this... this! This resonates soooo deeply with me.
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.
autoexec
> The wild thing is that these tech "systems" (aka companies) are made up of ostensibly good people.
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.
jondlm
I did say "ostensibly" ;)
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.
omnimus
> “The people running these companies certainly aren't good people”
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.
jimbokun
Most currently poor people would have the exact same failings if they suddenly found themselves with vast power.
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.
jimbokun
Too many tech people only focus on developing enhanced capabilities and find philosophy, let alone moral systems like religion, useless or absurd.
But with powerful AI models the philosophical and moral and religious questions have become impossible to ignore.
undefined
watwut
I think that CEOs of those companies are ethically challenged people, narcissists and sociopaths.
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.
jondlm
> I think that CEOs of those companies are ethically challenged people, narcissists and sociopaths.
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?
jimbokun
The vast majority of people suddenly become ethically challenged narcissists and sociopaths if given too much power.
andrewmutz
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 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.
whimsicalism
It's scrollable algo video. This is at the root of essentially all of our current cultural woes. I was in denial about this for a long time, but atp it's undeniable.
squidsoup
> 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.
jchw
> 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.
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.
vitaflo
It’s like trying to give up smoking when all your friends still smoke. Even if you do give it up you either also give up your friends or still reek of cigarettes.
squidsoup
> It's actually not so hard for me to just not take part in social media
Unfortunately that’s not quite as easy for people in creative professions that must now use social media to promote themselves and their work.
jms703
> tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives
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.
sylos
We are rapidly reaching a point where companies will exist without human employees, there'll just be the owners and an ai workforce.
autoexec
Who is going to buy what they're selling? More AI?
pixl97
We call this system Moloch.
thewebguyd
> I certainly know that my life was transformed for the worst by social media. And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes
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.
asveikau
> ... 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
Not so fast. Violent crime has been declining for about 30 years. Tech has been ascendant in that time.
jf
This comment resonated with me in a way that few pieces of writing do. My only complaint is that it’s perhaps too short. I get the impression that you could turn this comment into longer post (with citations) and I encourage you to do so.
gortok
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 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.
ericmcer
Heavily agree.
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.
btbuildem
I think we got excited / wanted to believe that we won't have to expend any effort whatsoever, and the AI could "do it all".
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.
Zigurd
Part of the reason coding agents are widely accepted and used is that human coders are chaos, and human coders have spent a lot of time building tooling to ameliorate chaos. Everything from git to language design, to lint, to profilers, etc. was built to keep the human chaos out. It's pretty good at keeping the LLM chaos out, and when it blows up anyway you can roll it back to the previous commit.
DamnInteresting
One recalls the Pentium FDIV bug, where an estimated 1 in 9 billion floating point divides with random parameters would produce inaccurate results[1]. A small subset of Pentium users would ever encounter the problem, yet it was considered a major controversy, and Intel ultimately replaced $475 million worth of CPUs (in 1994 dollars)[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/its-been-30-...
nonethewiser
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 does lose time predictability.
So if your problem with AI is accuracy, then in theory your problem is just premature stopping.
fluoridation
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.
nonethewiser
> 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.
No, that's not what I'm saying. Im saying determinism isn't required for correctness. And Im not saying that models are already perfect other than prematurely stopping. What I am saying is that non-determinism doesn't mean they cant be 100% correct.
Besides, humans baby-sitting LLMs is not even implied by the misinterpretation of what I'm saying. What's implied by that is humans needing to give the LLM explicit success criteria from the outset. Which is totally reasonable.
> Like the GP said, the point of determinism is that you can trust the correctness of the results
Well, no. Now you are waaaay overstating determinism. Deterministic results might be incorrect.
layer8
The economics of it (token cost) means, however, that what will be chosen most often is the barely sustainable minimum level of quality, aka race to the bottom. AI is more cost-sensitive in that way than humans caring or not caring about making things robust and correct used to be.
nonethewiser
For sure, that's why I say in theory. Also models aren't perfect. You can't plug in an explicit target and ensure it doesnt stop prematurely and expect 100 accuracy. But that's not because it's non-deterministic, since clearly non-deterministic systems can be 100% accurate.
lwhi
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.
nonethewiser
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 defined and it never prematurely stops, the question changes from "will the output be correct" to "when will it be done?"
SpaceNoodled
> we just dont know when
Ah, so it's merely functionally useless, if not theoretically.
nrightnour
Correct.
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.
cryo32
Yep. Exactly why we use machines. They do the deterministic bit quickly. We do the other bits.
mgfist
> there are plenty of places where machine learning algorithms make sense, but customer service is not one of them.
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.
webdood90
The root of all our evils, right here. We only want the fastest cheapest thing possible, without thinking about how it impacts literally everything else about our world.
satvikpendem
They never said fastest or cheapest, they said it should resolve the issue. A fast cheap human who can't is not better than an AI that can.
jstummbillig
Reality is non-deterministic (not actually, but in practice). We do strange things to balance this out all the time. Thinking that computer software must be exempt from that mess as a goal is just strange, and concerns itself too much with the ideal of a tool and not enough with the more important question: What if our lives get much, much better? Roughly everyone wants more out of life including the top one percent (and I don't mean the top 0.0001%, just your ordinary industrial nation doctors). How could we possibly morally justify denying everyone the best shot to get at least to that level, and I mean living people RIGHT NOW, ASAP not in a few hundred years? Who would be okay to say "yeah but you know, artists, copyright" and deny those who benefit most from this the opportunity?
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.
awkwardpotato
> Thinking that computer software must be exempt from that mess as a goal is just strange
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)
win311fwg
> Why go from something objective/provable to something that does "strange things", when we already have former?
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".
jstummbillig
Here is a simple and possibly clarifying thought experiment: Would you be willing to switch your standard of living with the standard of the median person living on this planet? (And I would urge you to look up what that looks like, in case you are unsure).
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.
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breezybottom
This is completely incoherent. Of course we need deterministic computer programs; much of society depends on it.
jstummbillig
All software written will not disappear. There is nothing keeping us from using partly undeterministic software (see: humans) to write deterministic programs.
michaelrpeskin
What does the N in NP stand for?
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.
pesus
> How could we possibly morally justify denying everyone the best shot to get at least to that level, and I mean living people RIGHT NOW, ASAP not in a few hundred years?
How exactly do you think this is going to happen?
jstummbillig
By trying! How else is it going to happen? Are we going to deny the immense potential? Nobody needs to draw up a specific plan for that to hold true, we are good at figuring shit out and using tools.
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.
bheadmaster
> Reality is non-deterministic (not actually, but in practice).
At a quantum level, it is also actually non-deterministic.
RadHazard
That's a common misconception.
undefined
stackghost
>What if our lives get much, much better? Roughly everyone wants more out of life including the top one percent (and I don't mean the top 0.0001%, just your ordinary industrial nation doctors). How could we possibly morally justify denying everyone the best shot to get at least to that level, and I mean living people RIGHT NOW, ASAP not in a few hundred years?
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.
monitron
Precisely! I don't think this is the whole problem but it's a part of it I keep coming back to. We took the one thing that computers were good at (getting the same answer every time, quickly and efficiently) and tossed it out the window.
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.
kypro
> there are plenty of places where machine learning algorithms make sense, but customer service is not one of them.
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.
thatmf
> 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.
karakoram
Exactly, there is no full opt-out in any product people use daily.
ori_b
Yes, "use this or be fired" tends to have an impact. A friend once made a analogy to opium: Sure, it's supposed to be addictive, but if you say no anyways, we're going to show up with gunboats.
pesus
Does not at all surprise me that people don't think losing their livelihoods would have a positive impact. Maybe AI companies should stop bragging about trying to do that if they're concerned about people hating them.
cryo32
The 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.
AngryData
I think the tech industry is overestimating its value. Because it can code they think it can do anything else, but unlike code a lot of other work can't have a bunch of little bugs and mistakes because you can't open up real life and edit it after the fact. Plus it lacks actual reasoning to solve novel problems.
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.
idank
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.
Whether the value attached to these companies is grounded in reality is a different question.
cryo32
The reality is experience isn't codified in text.
It's passed person to person over long periods of time.
And you can't train an LLM on that.
cozzyd
It can barely read a datasheet correctly, in my experience, getting confused between different registers.
manoDev
Definitely. The secret will be identifying use cases where AI usage is a potential upside with limited downside, not the current blanket statements about replacing all jobs without considering lifetime ROI. There’s a lot of boring work AI can automate with minimal risk. There’s also the potential to decrease risk with AI too, including ensembles of different AIs modals and AI + human.
bwestergard
"There’s a lot of boring work AI can automate with minimal risk. There’s also the potential to decrease risk with AI too, including ensembles of different AIs modals and AI + human."
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.
munk-a
A human that hand-compiles 10,000 lines of C code is a very silly person. A human that works on device drivers and drops into assembly code for a dozen highly critical lines to enable real time communication can be irreplaceable. AI is a tool that can be highly useful and it's a tool with a number of large flaws that you need to acknowledge and account for. Knowing when it's worth using is a vital skill.
rhipitr
I think also, just seeing non-technical friends and family interact with it, there’s a lot of massaging you have to do right now to get it to work that just goes over their heads. Until they gets pushed behind an abstraction layer I see adoption crawling at a certain point.
aspenmartin
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.
cryo32
I'd argue the economy is propped up on pointless work providing employment. If you throw AI in that it'll contract and it'll either collapse entirely or move to a social care model that no one will foot and rapid class division. You'll end up with burning or unused datacentres that is all.
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.
JoBrad
I’ve never seen these style arguments pass the “show me a good example” phase, at the scale that would be needed to “prop up the economy.”
univocal
It's more telling of the state of economy right now than AI.
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.
al_borland
AI seems more like a feature than a product.
aspenmartin
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
nozzlegear
Well, they hope they are on such a path.
aspenmartin
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.
ForHackernews
The product is firing half your workforce. You don't need marketing, that sells itself in the B2B space.
aspenmartin
To me I don’t really see this; electricity, the internet, etc: aggregate employment numbers don’t change work just gets shifted around. But your workers at the very least will be way more productive and that’s the sell.
cyanydeez
~~economy~~fascism
aspenmartin
Absolutely, you are right even though many may consider this too snarky. But herein lies the fork in the road.
- 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?
baron816
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.
alpha_squared
> 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.
baron816
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.
dgellow
> writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.
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.
munk-a
44% of Americans believe AI will have a neutral impact while 40% believe it will have a negative impact. Just to note - about half as many Americans believe AI will have a positive impact as believe in telepathy. Believing AI will have a positive impact is officially a fringe belief.
cryo32
I'm not even media and I'm demonising it. It's the hubris of the technology industry attempting to destroy society for financial gain only.
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.
willis936
The media are followers here, not leaders. 84% of people can't agree on the color blue[0]. Don't try to make excuses for a few billionaires finding the limit of their reality distortion field.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4921196/#:~:text=A%...
esseph
> I really think there’s a concerted effort by the media to demonize AI though
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.
breezybottom
The media is largely owned by tech billionaires, so why would they be against their own products?
apical_dendrite
Altman, Amodei, Musk and other tech industry leaders (not to mention technologists like Hinton) are constantly making public statements that predict everything from massive job loss, to restructuring of society to the possibility of an end to our species. The media is taking their cue from the tech industry itself.
operatingthetan
It's to the point where if you drop an AI meme or screenshot of text in chat people will mock you. I don't see that getting better?
munk-a
Memes have associations, connotations, subtleties in how they're used in different contexts - they're a communication medium. A well applied meme is like (it isn't - but it can be viewed similarly to) poetry where you've matched your idea with an evocative statement to a perfect degree and the subtleties and implications in your head are well and fully transferred to the reader. An AI meme is like a dry technical paper that lays out all of the information in a kludgy unimaginative manner. Good meme based communication relies on a lot of audience understanding and can draw people together as a demonstration of kinship.
operatingthetan
I mean I can make a good meme with AI but it requires effort to ensure it is indistinguishable from a homegrown meme.
aspenmartin
Does it need to?
pesus
If anything, it should continue and apply to anyone using AI.
operatingthetan
nope!
spprashant
Not ever profession has an insatiable desire to automate away their own jobs.
atleastoptimal
They didn't overestimate the interest. ChatGPT is extremely popular and notable.
>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.
cryo32
Not quite. They don't operate like that.
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.
atleastoptimal
They are having no problems raising capital. People are offering up their homes to get Anthropic stock.
>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?
CamperBob2
It is not ok to lobby and manipulate governments for fiscal policy changes to write off the costs and risks on the general public.
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.
hk__2
> ChatGPT is extremely popular
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.
atleastoptimal
It is the 5th most commonly visited website in the world
karakoram
I have said this before, I just can NOT understand how you can measure adoption of a technology or product without giving people a full opt-out.
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.
vanuatu
It's interesting that many developing and Asian countries have a more positive view of AI: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/15/people-around-the-w...
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)
SimianSci
Asian countries have governments that are at least seemingly vested in the interests of their populace. They have significant political and economic safety nets in place that can assure their populations that the government is at least somewhat aligned with the populace.
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.
sleples
Part of it is the ridiculous fear-based marketing campaign spearheaded by Anthropic et al. about how AI will automate all jobs and you'll be left behind. Works for enterprise/CEOs, predictably makes regular people hate the mere mention of AI, Asian countries don't have this nearly to the same extent.
shimman
Well most of it not really fear mongering, more like Americans are slowly waking up to the realization that consolidating the nations wealth to a few dozen people is not healthy for the country nor democracy.
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.
ori_b
vanuatu
an article on one person? cmon
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)
zuzululu
> Chinese people have much more faith in their govt than Western countries,
but you know why that is right (really hoping you know the difference and where this comes from and its not culture)
zuzululu
probably because none of these polls can be trusted or accurate representation
vanuatu
but we trust the stat that 16 pct of americans have a positive view?
zuzululu
none includes the article in question.
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.
SpicyLemonZest
I guess I'd say the latter, although I think that fact does not quite have the valence that Western critics might assume. Vietnam, one of the most AI-positive countries in this poll, is explicitly planning (https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/commun...) to use AI to suppress dissent and achieve permanent authoritarian control of the Vietnamese information ecosystem. I think they might be right that it'll work!
softwaredoug
The promoters of AI themselves seem pretty convinced of the negative impact to society. It seems to even be part of the marketing.
There’s very clearly a Substack of putting everyone out of work, reducing the power of labor, so a few can profit.
renjimen
AI epitomises chasing a narrow definition of progress that benefits the few (increasing profits via automation) over a holistic definition of progress that benefits the many (reducing poverty, improving health, providing meaning). It's no wonder people hate it.
simonw
> 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 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.
randusername
I think there is a valid point here that Anthropic has a found a great product-market fit among programmers.
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)
SpicyLemonZest
I had a big culture shock moment when I had to prep some slides a few weeks back. I'd assumed it would be a breeze now: I've always been good at making slide decks, I had a clear classification-friendly idea of exactly what I wanted them to look like, and there's even an AI native integration! Nope, didn't work, just had to shuffle components around like I always have.
12_throw_away
Ah, they're using the wrong model, of course. "AI" hasn't failed, it's the users who are wrong.
lunar_mycroft
Is Claude really that much better than all the others for normal use?
logicchains
It's not that Claude is better, it's that Gemini and Copilot are so overwhelmingly bad.
simonw
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.
Filligree
Yes. There’s not really any doubt about it.
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citrin_ru
Surprisingly high number given that people are being told by tech CEO that AI will replace all white collar jobs soon and a few years later AI guided robots will replace all blue collar jobs too.
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Please link to the actual survey instead of this commission outlet, which didn't even link it themselves: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an...
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".