If anyone here follows the news they know that many Americans have shown in polls they are highly skeptical of Ai. Graduates are even booing commencement speakers when they mention AI. Is this anger really warranted? I know the respectful founder of DeepLearning.AI Andrew Ng has publicly stated there will be no Jobapolclypse from AI but the whole idea of Capitalism itself might be tied to this fear along with other in my opinion. Was is the public relations about the future with AI been so dismal? I personally can’t tell anyone how enriching it is to have an AI partner always available to talk to me 24/7. Why is this breakthrough lost on the public? I hope an AI discussion like this is within the guidelines of this message board. I use AI to write anyways.
I think the public anxiety around AI is understandable because people associate major technological shifts with job loss, economic instability, and corporations gaining even more power, so the messaging around AI often feels threatening instead of empowering. Media coverage also tends to focus on replacement, misinformation, or worst-case scenarios rather than the everyday benefits people already experience, like learning faster, reducing loneliness, improving creativity, or having instant access to knowledge and support. Figures like argue AI will reshape work more than erase humanity’s role entirely, but the fear persists because many people do not yet trust that society or capitalism will distribute the benefits fairly. In practice, for many users AI already feels less like a cold machine and more like a useful companion, tutor, collaborator, or productivity partner, and that side of the technology is often missing from the public conversation.
I do agree on almost all those points. The Luddites also come to mind. During the early industrial revolution there were protests in England against the use of textile machines saying they were going to take jobs away. These Luddites even destroyed machinery. This also happened in the early 1800s so its nothing new. The car replaced the horse, and urbanization happened because farming techniques improved to a point that substantive farming was no longer required. Progress has a long history as does the opposition to it. Still, this time a lot is being shaped with AI and there are a lot of fears out there. This is probably why the stewardship now is so critical. Who’s hands is it in? That’s a topic I plan on writing about.
Great parallel, Will. The Luddites are exactly the right historical anchor here. Taylor made the same point in Principles of Scientific Management (1911), citing the Manchester cotton riots: displacement fears were real, but mass production ultimately made cotton accessible to everyone. Technology redefines labor more than it destroys it.
That said, today’s AI anxiety has two legitimate roots. Psychologically, Kahneman showed that humans are wired to weight immediate threats over long-term gains, and today’s media environment floods that instinct with noise. Economically, the fear isn’t entirely irrational. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, in Power and Progress (2023), argue that when technology concentrates gains at the top without redistributing productivity broadly, it hollows out the middle class and depresses aggregate demand. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee raised a similar alarm in The Second Machine Age (2014), warning that rapid automation can outpace society’s ability to retrain workers, creating structural unemployment rather than the transitional kind history usually corrects. A company that automates away its entire workforce also eliminates its own customer base. That is not just a moral problem; it is a self-defeating business model.
So the real question isn’t whether AI advances, but who stewards it. The goal should be augmentation, not replacement. Looking forward to your piece on exactly that.
What do you think Washington’s role is when it comes to AI? A lot of the media coverage is on the spectrum of enslavement to global apocalypse at least in some of the most alarmist terms. Although I don’t really feel that is really going to happen (I’ve only been really engaging for a month) shouldn’t voters also have some sort of say in the future of AI?
On Washington’s role in AI, your instinct that voters should have a say is actually one of the most important and underrated points in this whole debate.
The alarmist framing (enslavement, apocalypse) tends to dominate headlines precisely because it’s dramatic, but it also obscures a more immediate and concrete problem: a handful of companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon are making decisions that will shape how billions of people work, communicate, and access information, with very little democratic input.
That concentration of power is a legitimate concern regardless of where you land politically.
So what should Washington actually do? Honestly, that’s still very much an open question, and the fact that you don’t have a firm view on government’s role in tech is quite reasonable given how new and fast-moving this is.
Transparency requirements are relatively uncontroversial. Knowing how these systems make decisions seems like a basic democratic expectation. Antitrust is arguably more relevant than any AI-specific regulation, since the concentration problem you identified is partly a market structure problem. And elected representatives are genuinely behind the curve, as many in Congress barely understand the technology, which makes meaningful oversight hard.
On the voter input question, the honest answer is that right now voters have almost no meaningful say. AI policy is being shaped through lobbying, executive orders, and private deals, not through broad democratic deliberation.
I am confident that democracy alone is not going to steer AI use to the greater good. Incompetent voters are not always hurt by their incompetence. Unskilled voters can rationalize the bad effects of policy, like saying Venezuela and China are not real socialist states when people focus on the defects of those states. I’d like to hear about how to regulate the bad effects of AI without destroying its capability. Loud data centers? Then, what audio levels and measuring criteria should be used to monitor compliance? Don’t enforce the use of specific sound dampening technology. Control the outcomes and results, not the methods. Too much draw on the electric grid? How do you write regulations that objectively measure grid health without imposing excess costs on data center develipers? I think the use of fully truthful propaganda is necessary. Present statistics along with emotionally uplifting anecdotes without hiding the problems. That is easy for me to say but hard to do. Maybe you can start your search for good stats and anecdotes on factual news sites like Reuters or the DeepLearning.AI newsletter.
I think the idea of oligarchy might be a problem for the future of AI but there is a deeper problem I have been exploring. How much will humans in the future outsource to AI and how much can a being remain human? It’s one of the topics I’m exploring and with that kind of power in the hands of a few the influence that AI might have on the human mind might have a broad influence just upon how human beings perceive the world. Perhaps the right question isn’t if AI is using your IP but if AI likes your IP. Whose hand that is in is critical right now.
I have another guess on why people hate AI aside from legitimate losses in quality of life, like the problems I enumerated to argue for regulating outcomes instead of technology or methods. The good and bad effects of AI are hard to process. It’s hard to tell how many jobs were cut because of AI versus jobs cut as part of corrections to the COVID-era overhiring. There isn’t enough data to tell how many jobs will be created, how many will be lost, and how long significant job disruptions will last. For example, I estimate that these studies would take thirty minutes to understand on the surface level and two to five hours to confidently accept, reject, or critique. Source analysis, checks for conflicts of interest among the researchers, and learning about fields outside of your specialization are hard to do. If the benefits of AI feel like a gamble where you could lose because of an RNG-like mechanism, it might feel good to hate AI.
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I think you’re right saying that we don’t really know the future with AI given the ripple effects that the technology might ensue. The future is meant to be written.
I think the main concerns: Many people worry AI could replace workers or reduce wages in certain industries.Privacy fears: AI systems can be trained on large amounts of data, raising concerns about surveillance and personal information.
In my opinion, those who won’t undersnatd the AI and its useage hate it. Otherwise it is there for benfit of humankind in one way or other.
I think someone is trying to hack my Meta account.
The speed differentiation here is key. Previous changes have been slower, replacing the workers that share a specific function with a new machine. Now, the machine can adapt quickly to multiple environments, there are in parallel entrepreneurs trying to disrupt health care, legal, CRM, writing, design, engineering.. you name it.
I was on analytics and saw it coming, so I specialize in AI. By the moment I finished AI had replaced data scientists.