The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam
wsj.com
wsj.com
It’s the constant drumbeat of “AI will take your job.”
It’s the constant news of “layoffs because AI makes us more productive.”
It’s the constant background discussion of UBI because no one will have jobs anymore.
It’s knowing that, in the US, UBI will never come.
It’s the feeling that the billionaires of Silicon Valley are getting rich and there isn’t even a “learn to code” path to wealth anymore.
It’s knowing that data centers will create problems in your neighborhood: the price of power and water will go up, the amount of undeveloped land down, and you don’t even get jobs out of it.
For fuck’s sake, it’s not about the thousands of Mag7 tech workers losing their jobs. That’s just a symptom, like all the other symptoms, of this weirdly dystopian future that the AI companies keep telling us is inevitable.
SWE layoffs are politically irrelevant. The kids booing commencement speakers, however, are not aspiring SWEs. AI CEOs’ rhetoric, in particular, Altman’s, has been aimed and successfully landed more broadly.
And I don’t think the underlying cause of the anxiety is unemployment, which remains relatively low. Finding a block of hard-working workers who used to be able to make ends meet, but now can’t, is a political goldmine for good reason.
(That can of course change very quickly, yes)
I think investors are starting to see stress on the market for fewer working people contributing back as customers and investors themselves. This creates depreciation in share value as no one is willing to invest.
At the very top are the big investment banks and fund houses, berkshire. Second are smaller institutions and third retail/individual.
The top two layers demand a steady return, never losing money on average in any 36 month window. Otherwise it triggers a selloff top down to cover for it.
The bottom follows the top so the selloff or buy just gets mimicked, with the top tier never losing (the bottom layers make sure of it by following blindly)
With wild indicators already set a massive selloff should have already been in motion, but its not. The top tier is getting more greedy.
No one is betting on AI long term. Everyone's in for the ride. As always the bottom will feed the top.
Nvidia is worth so much if it fails it takes investments with it. The risk is too high.
It seems that ROI has become more important in the last 5 years, but then again you have these Space or Rare Earth shitcos trading at -200x PE while all of their industrial promise is directly undermined by rising costs from AI.
The likely forecast for this year is either rate hikes combined with further labor market deterioration and consumption somehow going negative, or inflation eating up all of the (still non existent) profits from AI mega caps themselves.
It’s hard to see how this ends well without a lowered cost of capital or more interest in taking on capex risk, which seems frankly unlikely. The worst case scenario seems to be a lot of bad debt with nobody except for perhaps Berkshire or China who would be interested or capable when it comes to salvaging it. Armchair economist here, grain of salts a plenty.
It might be literally impossible but that's what the numbers are.
How different would AI sentiment be if this never happened?
It wouldn't exist.
Who would buy this?
Show me any "little guy" suddenly competing with the "big guys" due to "AI." Any single examples? Remember the dawn of the internet? Where this very thing was happening every day?
The writing is on the wall. People imagine they're going to turn their $2500 computer into a butler and never work again so their brains are just shut off to the obvious.
So for the Mag7 it's kinda AI, in that they want to maintain margins and invest loads more into capital for AI infrastructure. Those layoffs clearly have AI associated with them.
For lots of other tech, I'm not sure. I do believe that productivity can increase in a bunch of places with AI tooling, but you need to build that tooling first, then monitor and ensure that it continues working. Like, the vast majority of tech companies already outsourced a lot of what AI tooling would/could do, so I'm somewhat sceptical of the rationale (AI is so good we can cut 20% of our staff).
Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419
Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674
Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107
An AI Hate Wave Is Here
2. Culture workers are a big part of who sets the narrative for the general population - especially young people.
3. Less than 1/5 of Gen Z are optimistic about AI and the number is falling: (https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skep...)
The current wave of AI companies did this to themselves. Had things moved more slowly and actively worked with all the affected industries, I suspect people would be far less interested in seeing the technology fail.
I get the feeling that shits coming to a head.
It seems to start happening when people hit 30 years of age. Maybe it’s because that’s when they start having children; I’m not sure.
The goal was to raise as much money as possible as fast as possible before the curtain is pulled back to reveal the Wizard's empire of lies.
There may be some lies, but a big part of the backlash against AI is that it is too effective. The backlash is growing precisely because people are finally getting out of the "it's just a tool and there will always be a place for humans!"-denial phase and into the "they took our jobs!"-anger phase. They're seeing the writing on the wall many (although surprisingly not all) in the tech sector saw long ago.
Additionally, I'm quite sure it's not backlash against slop, as some might think. People have disliked spam and ads forever, but all in all they'll happily stomach loads of it just to watch some badly written Hollywood or Netflix human slop.
Also dont be ridiculous. We didnt go extinct from the nuke, we wont go extinct from a next token predictor
Yet. We've come very close (see e.g. Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls). A catastrophic mistake or miscalculation could trigger a massive exchange at any time; it could happen on any given Thursday.
Also love the term culture workers. Everyone keeps talking about knowledge workers but culture workers play a huge part in society that no one in the AI space mentioned
Counterpoint: AI's displacement of culture workers is to this point negligible. Nobody is consuming AI-generated media, except maybe in the trashiest tier of tiktok scrolling. Culture workers feel screwed, but they have not in fact been screwed.
The entire AI wave is built on the shameless wholesale theft of the hard work of others. This exploitative, extractive business model is really no different from the legalised banditry operated by PE value extraction outfits like Vista and their ilk -- just on a vastly greater scale.
Late stage capitalism stopped building value years ago. It's now all about building wealth pumps and toll booths all over the economy to immorally extract as much value as possible, from as many different people as possible, as efficiently as possible.
Executive teams are under pressure to cut costs now to fund AI investment and capture efficiencies they believe competitors are already realizing, fueled by an echo chamber that inflates small AI advancements (relative to impact) into evidence of sweeping transformation. My gut says offshore is benefiting from, and accelerating through, this transition because it remains the most familiar and defensible path to immediate cost cutting for most organizations.
It is a very fun tool when used correctly. I think there is a point where our current technology will wall before we achieve genuinely good AI. We're starting to see that now.
We are also over invested in it which also leaves us vulnerable for a crash in the market.
I had to suffer through taling to Sutter Heath's AI three times today before I could get through to a person to tell them about a billing mistake. I finally decided to send a formal demand letter via FedEx (written with the help of AI) rather than deal with all this AI slop they've put between me and customer service.
Checking MSN is a good alternative to archive.ph, or otherwise searching for the author and title?
Companies have their relationship with people, specifically employees, backwards. What percentage of companies out there are truly needed? What percentage solely exist because people have some surplus money to play with?
No one needs Microsoft or Google products. No one needs overpriced Apple crap. AI means jack shit to almost 100% of Americans. Streaming services are one bad day away from ruin. We’ve seen what piracy can do. Now we have faster, better internet. Food delivery services RIP. I buy so little from Amazon these days that I’m questioning the $15 per month value of Prime.
I hope we see society correct course and go back to how it was in the 90’s, before everything went to shit. No social media. No smart phones. Going out more. Less digital noise. Physical media from physical stores. The list goes on…
The time to have quit Prime was years ago, before the price hikes, the degradation of service, their complicity in the sale of counterfeit goods, etc. People didn't leave. They won. They know they can do what they want now.
We won a contest against a global superpower, due to administrations stretching across generations executing on a consistently-escalating strategy, and then balanced the budget on the peace dividend. Of course it was great. The point is there wasn’t the option of just doing the 90s in the 60s, 70s or even 80s—it had to be diligently worked towards and sacrificed for. (To be clear, our leaders of those eras, flawed as they were, could ask for those sacrifices.)
Then you add in on top of that people hearing that everyone's job is in jeopardy, like right now, even if it's not really true. Plus rumors about how untrustworthy people like Sam Altman are. Not to mention that they are San Francisco elites. Lawsuits. Cozying up to Trump. Etc. It's not surprising most of the sentiment around AI is incredibly negative and getting more negative by the day.
The fearmongers will tell stories about biological or chemical weapons. It'll be things you could learn from a textbook - something like mercury molecules or cultivating rabies. People will vote to ban AI.
The puritans will clutch their pearls because it can be used to make porn they don't like. They'll vote to ban AI.
People who are afraid of losing their jobs will make tangential arguments about copyright violations. They'll vote to ban AI.
So citizens won't be allowed to use AI directly.
Instead, there will be regulatory capture. Microsoft and Apple will pay fees for compliance testing (bribes). Then they'll serve you a dumbed down version you can't escape. "I see you're trying to analyze numbers. Click here for a free signup to Office 365!".
The social media sites will make sure you still have access to create rage bait slop. That improves engagement.
Big software companies will pay for bug finding services. Small open source projects won't have the money.
If you're upset by AI, you should ask yourself if that's part of the plan. Because there's a lot of money to be made and power to be stripped from citizens if everything above comes true.
[0] - I've been using llama.ccp and Ollama. I should checkout vLLM.
I just have trouble seeing how we get to there from here. Vote to ban AI? Has anything like that happened before?
They were bragging to shareholders about how AI was being used to slash headcount, to gratuitously ruin thousands of lives to pump up the bottom line and "reward" their already-pampered shareholders. They themselves got handsomely rewarded for it.
Now they're crying and acting all butthurt for the intense negative public reaction their greed-driven communication strategy provoked.
Well, that is RATHER unfortunate, isn't it??
Stop telling me to stop beating my wife, I'm not even married. You don't know what Luddites are, and I don't know what eco-nihilists are.
> we continue to outlaw development
Again, I have no idea what this is even referring to. I'm sure you mean something with that, but expressed in such a hyperbolic, all-or-nothing way I just don't know what to do with it, sorry.
Sounds like you should embrace a Chinese future just like you’ve embraced AI.
The issues with "AI" is basically that profits once again get centralize while costs are outsourced. "The West" basically means buy our slop, die in our wars, die in the cold when you're elderly, but rest assured you're part of "The West" and "The West" is totally showing "the Chinese" what's what. While they tell their people the same thing. It's the same everywhere, all the time. And the argument is never a track record of success, but forms of "We cannot afford evidence in form of a mushroom cloud". Well, I think you're wrong and falling for liars, I say bring it.
The former either seem puzzled about the general public's anger at AI or dismissive of it ("they don't really hate it - look at ChatGPT usage!", "they only hate it because they've been misled about water usage!" and so on).
Non-techies aren't as stupid as people in the tech industry think. Normies can see their social media feeds filling up with slop. They see people in their social circles who can no longer hold a normal conversation without feeding everything into ChatGPT. And - most importantly, I suspect - they are seeing the plan they've built their lives around - get your kids to do well in school, get them into college so they can have a good career and make enough to pay of the loans that plan will require - being casually dismissed by AI boosters ("they'll be plenty of jobs, we just don't know what they are yet!").
Here's a clue for people who don't understand the backlash: if you don't understand that stability has value on its own, then you lack a basic understanding of what more people actually care about.
I think that the concerns underlying the outrage are real and honestly valid, but the question I’m asking now isn’t “how to stop it” but “what now”? Because economies are cyclical and if it wasn’t AI it’d have been something else that would threaten our survival, and there are many good alternatives right now: climate change and war.
I'm right there with you. I think AI will be bad as a whole for the world, but I use it for work every day and am pushing my team to use it more. I think it's a really effective tool for my company even if it's going to be bad for the world overall.
> I don’t believe that strong public opinion can stop technological development either—just take nuclear for example.
I see nuclear as an example of where public opinion did stop development. In the US at least, we've basically given up on nuclear power, much to our detriment.
Another example of this is human cloning, which seemed inevitable back when Dolly the sheep was first cloned.
Human cloning is a solution with no corresponding problem. We can make more humans very easily, if we have someone willing to bear those humans and take care of them.
If AI becomes demonstrably useful, opting out will be incredibly challenging, since we cannot force other countries to disarm.
AI is just the next wave, and the impact is more tangible than ever – it literally takes your job, and it's being pushed on you by enormously wealthy people who don't understand you, your life, and what's important to you. The sad thing is, AI can be beneficial to people if wielded in the right way, but we are in a polarized environment where productive conversations no longer feel possible: you're either an AI bro or a luddite. I think anyone (myself included) who has spent time developing B2C products that incorporate AI quickly discovers just how touchy of a subject this is, and it's due imo to the sins of the accelerationist crowd that never wastes time understanding the needs and perspectives of normal people.
There are three options:
1. AI owned by everyone
2. No AI
3. AI owned by billionaires
If you can make the masses fight for 2 instead of 1, then you guarantee that you don't get 1. If instead, the masses fight for 1, they've got a chance of getting it. You present AI as a false dichotomy: no AI or AI for billionaires. But 2 is a fantasy. There will be AI.
Any of us arguing for (1) get shouted down by the very people who would benefit most from it. The masses do the job of the billionaires.
Most utopian science fiction has AI doing the work and humans leading a life of leisure (e.g. Culture novels). Dystopian futures have AI keeping the rabble under control (Neil Asher's Owner Trilogy, Elysium). Time to choose folks.
For that matter, I wish those who were pro-AI were more strictly supportive of #1.
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|sed '1,/\"body\":\"/d;/\"readTimeMin\":/,$d'So pepl gonna riot and hunt down AI researchers and ceos and gonna burn them at the stake and then eat them :D. Musk will tell the sect members to hunt down Sam and the first one who bites his calves will be awarded a cybertruck.
Oh and data centers gonna be looted after hungry pepl eat the security guards and the mercenaries. Also remember everyone have rifles and gatlings buried in the garden :DDD.
Niice future.