The AI backlash is only getting started(economist.com) |
The AI backlash is only getting started(economist.com) |
Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? There is nothing sexy about it. There is nothing cool about it either.
Imagine a taxi driver facing his family knowing he will be replaced by a machine fully; imagine that taxi driver thinking that there are slick graduates from top schools who wake up everyday (waymo, tesla, zoox) with one goal in mind - let's automate this taxi driver.
The anger against AI/Tech is just starting really.
There is a lot of money to be made in the destruction of civilisation.
> Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines??
Because arms race.
Game dynamics and incentive structures don't cease to exist just because someone notices them.
Cal Newport calls this "Doom-Trolling" — there was an NYT article, he has talked about it on his youtube channel and there was an actually really great, long discussion with Ed Zitron about it where Ed covered a lot more topic ground than he has been focussed on lately.
He makes the case that this fear-based marketing is causing real harm and unnecessary anxiety and is basically despicable.
How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today.
AI is an interesting experiment with some real-world applications, but it’s no tractor or mechanical loom... not yet, at least, and it’s far from clear that it ever will be.
As things stand today, AI is not the future. It’s a tool with genuine uses that is being marketed as a revolution.
2. If 1 happens, it is foreseeable that they don't even need that many slaves to tend to the machines, so not many "new" jobs created I'm afraid.
Comparing that to the computer -- yes if you are a typist you are doomed -- but they still need someone to type -- just not on a typewriter. And there are suddenly countless new requirements (e.g. video games, CGI, etc.) getting created from thin air. I don't really see this happening for AI -- like, do you see any NEW requirements getting created? Sure we are getting endless AI slop games/videos/fictions, but are they new? People can only consume that many products and pumping 100x into the system doesn't work -- except to make profit drop to ZERO for every ordinary creator out there.
BTW I do think there will be new requirements -- robotics combined with AI (e.g. who doesn't want a handsome husband or a beautiful wife?) -- but again it is to replace humans.
3. Apparently, accountability has dropped to a new low, since the end of the Cold War. So naturally cattle and sheep (I mean, us, ordinary people) are scared. Back then at least the elites were willing to make gestures and put up facades. Nowadays they simply don't GAF.
I reject this argument as bad faith from the start.
Tractors are tools to make hard boring labor easier.
People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff. Right now, the world can’t come close to making all the stuff people want. As long as there’s a desire for further consumption, there will be work for people to do.
The claim is that the value of most human labor will be at or near enough to 0 compared to deploying capital (robots, ai) to product the same goods. So humanity becomes owners living ludicrously well on highly productive capital and everyone else getting whatever “humanitarian” portion is assigned to them. And no way to move from “permanent underclass” to capital owning class, besides maybe winning the Beast Games.
Every single expert I asked in our circle had at least serious doubts they will have jobs in 10 years. Doctors, lawyers, assistants, of course IT folks, various other white collar jobs. Of course managers with FIRE button are very anxious and feel like firing should have been done yesterday as long as resulting damage is manageable, quietly hoping they will not be also made redundant because at the end same logic applies to them and they often add little on top of simple yes/no decisions sucked out of a thumb.
How disconnected somebody has to be to think folks would cheer on something that will cause absolute catastrophe for them and their families. Literally everybody groks it. Nobody expects employers to have any empathy when they could be removed.
One hopefully positive aspect is - prices are rising, and when SHTF they should be on level which makes them long term sustainable, making obvious how costly such replacement would be. But I think it will still be worth it in high cost societies unless governments add regulatory & financial friction, in similar vein ie chinese cars have high import fees.
> To that end, here are four pointers for politicians and AI companies looking for policies.
Extrapolating from the past, none of these are particularly likely to happen, however.
Another notable aspect is that, unlike many other societal issues, the backlash against AI is decidedly bipartisan.
"Blockers need to be shown that their local area will benefit if they get out of the way." Benefit how? Will this be like when your city convinces you it's in everyone's interest to subsidize the latest billionaire-owned sports stadium?
"If America succumbs [to popular rage], it could cede the global ai frontier" ah here we go. The next generation of Too Big To Fail.
>The buildings summon a vitriol well beyond conventional nimbyism. More Americans say they would be happy with a nuclear reactor next door than a data centre. Even plans to build one in the Utah desert have met with passionate opposition.
Certainly in my own life it's made some things easier. But that just means I move on to the next thing quicker - the treadmill never stops. Does AI improve my life yet? I'm not so certain.
"Let them eat cake...", I wonder what the 'taken out of context' trigger will be this time around
In some sense it's probably acting as a lightning rod for resentment, and that resentment is combined with marketing spiel from the model companies alongside well-placed concern over the impact of AI on employment.
They see that AI is capable and fear it.
If you watch an AI and dig into the details of everything it is doing, you can see it repeatedly banging into these guard rails. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily. As a human being, I bang into those guard rails all the time too. That's where they came from in the first place, to let humans bang into them. And we've built a lot of them.
However, in a lot of the rest of the world their experience with AI much more resembles that of the more critical voices that post here. A lawyer who uses an AI that makes two correct citations and then an incorrect one has many fewer automated guard rails to work with. It is relatively easy to imagine a system that at least verifies the citation exists (I've heard that's easier said than done due to the system depending on humans to resolve sloppy references but still it's feasible), but the task of deciding if the AI correctly used the citation, either in the abstract sense of it being correct or in the sense of it being the best way to use it to advance the current case, is a vastly harder decision than "ah, that change failed to compile, try again".
Accounting seems like another good example. Yes, it has the obvious guard rail of "do the books balance", but that's the beginning of accounting, not the end. It's difficult to put up guard rails for how the accounting is done from there. An accountant will experience an AI accountant as doing OK sometimes but making really dumb decisions that couldn't be caught by anything other than human review, and I have to imagine that the lack of learning and the way the AI will tend to make the same mistakes over and over must be incredibly aggravating.
I think there's probably more truth to "AI is useless" than we may see. I think a lot more people than we realize have had the experience of using AI a while, putting some trust in it, then having that trust grotesquely violated when it says something stupid in an email or makes boneheaded errors in a spreadsheet. We're maybe just now exiting the portion of the hype cycle where it is simply culturally unacceptable to criticize the AI and entering the part where it is culturally both acceptable and expected, and we software engineers may look on in bafflement at the other fields and their complaints because it's working for us, what's your problem?
[1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/programming_is_engineering/
0. No one wants a datacenter in their backyard or hooked up to the grid while the electricity burden is carried by households. People are afraid of losing their property values and being unable to move away if a DC is built nearby - effectively being trapped there. People in Memphis are breathing in gas fumes from the XAI datacenter there. There are concerns about corrosion byproducts making its way into the aquifers from DC waste water. If DC construction takes the cheap option no sound insulation is installed and people can’t sleep and some even lose their hearing: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2...
People are pissed that towns and cities are bypassing public approval to placate corporate builders.
1. People have been told to fear for their jobs
2. Many people believe labs have stolen vast amounts of intellectual property
3. Engineers are being pressured to use AI and told they “aren’t prompting right” if/when it doesn’t work for their use case
I can go on. But I actually think the majority of the backlash has nothing to do with stock valuations.
I think it exacerbates the points you make. "You mean, you want to take all the IP, immediately force the tech on us, maybe make my job redundant, and you want billions in funding for it!?"
That argument applies better to blast furnaces than to data centers, but I don't see people complaining about steel. Data centers just don't take up much space or power in the scope of industrial manufacturing.
Your other arguments are legitimate, but "it's a waste of electricity" and "data centers make some significant difference to a nontrivial number of people" are not the same propositions.
It really doesn't help to have stuff like this in print:
> a technology that could power a surge in productivity and incomes, help find cures for untreatable diseases and improve everything from education to green tech.
They just take these claims completely uncritically and move on. Where is the productivity increase? Where are the cured diseases? Where are the improvements in education and green tech? So far, it's all a big fat zero. Maybe in 2yrs some of this will actually be true? Is that the hope?
This is scammer shit. If any of this was true you wouldn't have to ask for extra time.
In a fit of pique I registered a funny domain: clankerwakers.com. I don't know if I'll actually do anything with it yet, but maybe we can make a dent in this nonsense if we record for posterity when people make sweeping claims with no evidence.
You were just denied an application because some LLM decided you fit a certain statistical pattern. Where did the LLM go wrong? What were the steps taken to make that decision? Who can you appeal to? Nobody. AI bureaucracy would just keep chugging along, making decisions based on prejudices and patterns it finds but doesn't feel.
Rainer Mühlhoff makes some compelling arguments in trying to warn people of the dangers of an AI bureaucracy/state.
Meanwhile, there are all these intellectual jobs which are hard for humans to do, so we assume they're just hard in general. Look closer, though, and many don't involve human social interaction, only require a small amount of good taste, and don't have any physical component.
This is really naïve in the long run, since you ultimately cannot solve social problems with technical solutions.
It's always techies that fail to realize the second / third and forth order of events when this level of disruption is measured by the number of mass layoffs you can do in each quarter.
Automate corporate bullshit. Keep your hands off the government. They are literally the only ones incentivized to not use you as toilet paper.
I'm sorry but all of this is to be determined but if the present is any indicator LLMs tend to make things distinctly worse, not better. Any areas of "potential" still rely on massive amounts of manual human labor, hardly a trillion dollar industry.
"Useful" in the sense of cheap parlor tricks, useful in the real sense that it enables mass surveillance on the cheap; but actually useless for the material lives of people around the world.
I'm sure it's great if you're a rich tech bro.
I predict costs will fall.
I don’t really have a use for it myself that I can’t solve some other way cheaper or easier without the damage and uncertainty it does.
I’m not really that impressed.
How many sub-par mathematicians could solve the unit distance conjecture?
Outside of my work - AI video has reached a point where creative artists are generating engaging, realistic content that is genuinely entertaining. IMO the common thread is that in the right hands it can produce amazing things. For anyone without the expertise, it defaults to slop.
Factually that's just not true. Five years ago current llms would have seen like magic to even data scientists working on them and realistically their impact has been felt by many. Just taking jobs into account, imagine an average worker in an average industry; how do you think something like Fable compares? Worse? By how much?
Like even many years ago we had alphafold that had a non negligible impact on biology, who knows what's gonna happen when this technology grows up.
Check out the work of Zack London (AKA Gossip Goblin) on YouTube. It's objectively good - I don't even care what your opinion is.
AI companies are becoming a catch-all / symbolic lightning rod for "the ruling class".
Some of these data centers are multiple orders of magnitude bigger than a blast furnace.
I think people are pissed that they're subsidizing the R+D cost of their own unemployment.
With LLMs you get incompetence cut off from human embodiment and any chance of empathy, baked into opaque black-boxes, and automated and scaled.
We should be arriving to build things that are correct, not saying "stuff sucks already, let's make more stuff that sucks."
Well, the attempt to claim that speaks to something, but the claim doesn't really, because it's not true.
Let's not even try to get people to think about people who are not them, people who are in need, people with disabled children, whatever. I don't know about the US because it has very few spaces where people actually live together like humans would, but for the majority of the world, at least in major cities: nevermind healthcare or pensions and whatnot, just consider garbage disposal, and maintenance of plumbing and sewer system, the electric grid.
If you could quicksave and experience that just for yourself, without fucking life up really badly for everyone else and for decades, you totally should. I don't think most people who talk this stuff from myopic bubbles would last even a week. Because they don't think so well, we know this from the arguments, and are not likeable, we know this from how they don't consider other people. So to me that's absolute bottom of the food chain energy talking about the Ark B. Pure, pristine, unadulterated projection.
- This thing is very consistently lying and misleading people. Do I want to introduce more deception and confusion into the world?
- people don't actually want to use this.
- I don't actually want to use this.
- Something about this feels wrong.
I dropped it. I have another couple of big language learning projects made with 100% human blood sweat and tears, long projects over many years. Zero LLMs or voice models used for anything. Those continue to grow and are loved, and I feel great about them.
Pretty bold statement to say it's useless for most people outside of tech. Almost every "normal" person I know including my in-laws are using it regularly. It's becoming the go-to for asking questions rather than Google, Bing, etc.
And the privacy battle was lost 25 years ago. People don't really care if corporations know about their search history (Google), or their private lives (Facebook). You're beating a dead horse there.