This is madness. The polling is in and the public hates, positively hates AI. So of course the response is to do AI even more. https://newrepublic.com/article/209163/ai-industry-discoveri...
from a business perspective, which of those two statistics would you give more weight?
"People use AI so this must be a revealed preference" is such a bad argument when people are feeling so precarious
in the context of answering the implied question of the parent (everyone hates it so why do they keep doing it?), it does not matter at all.
If a large proportion of people are only using AI because they are being threatened with unemployment if they don't, then there's going to be massive resentment building up
You may think that doesn't matter, but it does. History has shown over and over that you can only keep a lid on massive social resentment for so long before things break
why should a company listen to a gallup poll of ~1,500 people over their own internal metrics?
do you think all types of companies should heed the advice of gallup polls over their own metrics, experience, and research?
A good example of how this works is cocaine.
Capitalism and competition isn't always good governance. It works brilliantly in many places, such as restaurants or commodity goods. It fails completely for medicine or banking. It's in between for tech or education, but it's clearly failing for AI.
hypothetically, you own a widget company. you sell a lot of widgets. every month, you are selling even more widgets. the widgets are flying off the shelves. you keep ramping up production, and the consumers keep on buying.
gallup releases a poll that says "people hate widgets".
would you stop/slow down your widget production?
for the same reason Vladimir Putin should listen to Russian milbloggers rather than his own subordinates, the metrics are being cooked up by people who get promoted for good metrics
Also the shelf metaphor is itself troubled because you're not even really selling any widgets for profit, you're just handing them out for free at the expense of hundreds of billions in investments that really are going to deprecate pretty fast
i think you have severely misunderstood the hypothetical
this does not matter from the business perspective.
microsoft does not care that your company forces you to use their products. google does not care that your school forces you to use their products. TSMC does not care that you are forced to use their products when purchasing ~any electronics. etc.
Is is OK for them to build datacenters in US?
in any case, its not really that complicated in this case.
- the ai companies have a billion active users and billions of dollars in revenue.
- a poll comes back with 30% of respondents saying they are angry about ai.
so, why do the ai companies keep doing ai things despite ~30% of people not liking ai? well, its because they are making billions of dollars in revenue from their billion users. from the ai company's perspective, it would be madness not to keep shoving ai everywhere.
It can be simultaneously true that a large part of the public objects to a thing while the market generates profits from that very thing.
Of course the answer is for governments to step in as, as you point out, the AI-related companies are behaving as rational actors given their incentive structure.
Capitalism abides by your dollars not your voice.
So people can decry ai all they want but if they keep using it, it won't go away.
Even then it's probable that AI is a big enough productivity boost for certain industries that even if no consumers used AI, businesses would still prop AI up enough for it to live on.
Simone Weil had good theoretical and practical observations on force vs economy 100 years ago.
Americans are too comfortable. Leftist rhetoric is virtue signaling and costless.
I disagree with theories of continual revolution, but it's pretty clear that class warfare still has valuable asymmetric qualities.