Hate it or love it, something's inevitably coming. Literally no way to stop it when it's ultimately China vs US, which wasn't even a concern during previous technological revolutions.
Nothing a couple years of brain washing bots and algorithmic feeds cant fix.
1. The public response resembles the stages of grief, and people are fluctuating between denial (AI isn't really that smart) and anger (AI is horrible).
2. Your perception of something tend to be shaped by the sum of your experiences with it, and a lot of the exposure to AI is via fake, scams, bots, and low efforts content (AI slop).
3. I think that the fear of losing your job and your life's stability is there, but it's not yet as common as it should be in the general public. I expect that to be the main driver of AI hate, and that will be a lot fiercer than the current hate, and could lead to a civil war or worse. Depending on AI progression.
4. There is also a lot of tribalism involved. We live in a polarized society, and many people adapt their opinions to the opinion of the group they identify with. That itself drives anger towards AI, as it is part of the greater cause.
Alex Karp, in particular, has some of the most absolutely horrifying clips of his TV appearances circulating all over video social media. But Musk has broader reach, and is even more oblivious and has tied himself to someone who he himself accused of pedophilia.
Andreesen, Thiel, Sam Altman, and the above are great at raising valuations for investors but they are doing it incredibly stupidly in a way that leads to massive backlash. California is voting for a billionaire tax this year, and I think that these tech CEOs only have themselves to blame for the backlash they are causing.
The problem isn't that these people are simply inarticulate and incapable of expressing their views in ways that appeal to people. It's that their views are unappealing (if not downright objectionable) to most people.
It's a sign of how disempowered the populace is that these selfish ghouls don't even feel the need to pretend to be decent functioning adults anymore. Because, why bother? What is anyone gonna do about it?
So yeah, money becoming less of a proxy of "how much someone contributed to society" and more "how much someone contributed to the oligarchs' goals", while those goals are for AI and for peoples' detriment, makes the situation actually about AI.
The technology that helps extract wealth improves, while most of the purely consumer-oriented products are becoming a con and a scam, especially if US companies are involved. The Mirabell's "original" recipe turned the best treat in the world into a generic candy, all are just palm oil + sugar + shrinkflation. There is also non-repairable tech with non-standard components, non-removable batteries, meat gets filled with water, washing machines die right after warranty ends, every digital service is trying to steal data instead of taking only the necessary or at least being transparent about what's taken and why, entertainment like Reddit and streaming services also get worse... AI slop is just another example, but a bit more visible and with a bit more side-effects.
Notice that all these countries are English speaking countries? Aside from speaking English they also have lots in common when it comes to the way the economy and society is run. I can only speak for the United States, but I’ve noticed unfordable not luxury apartments going up everywhere and starter homes are not.
It looks more like you only read English-language news which is concerned about the happenings in English-speaking countries.
https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_count...
These are current average houseprice-to-income ratios per country. The first English-speaking country on that list is in 87th rank.
But the real villains here are the same as ever, the most dangerous non-human persons: corporate persons.
The economy, real wages, etc are basically higher than ever (despite idiot Trump's best efforts).
People are mad because being mad is fun and we're all on being mad machines 24/7.
Objectively bullshit. Good god. Get a fucking grip, speaking of "gaslighting".
Hopefully non-logged in users can at lease see the income-by-age graph: https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=480,quality=10...
https://prospect.org/2024/05/14/2024-05-14-trendy-nonsense-g...
> The Economist piece and kindred articles are good examples of how to lie with statistics. You can show that the typical 25-year-old’s income outpaces boomers’ income when they were 25 only by failing to adjust for inflation and the rising costs of life’s necessities, or using averages rather than medians.
But the Economist did use inflation-adjusted median earnings in its analysis of incomes by age among different generations. The Economist cited the median after-tax income, adjusted for inflation. (https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=10...) I'm not sure why this author seems to think that the Economist is failing to adjust for inflation or not using medians, when it says so quite clearly in their graphs.
The Prospect article also says that home ownership among under-35s has gone down, and links to data on the home ownership rates grouped by age (https://www.prb.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/a-02132020-ar...) but the data ends in 2017. The oldest of Gen-Z would only be 20 years old at the time this data ends. When we look at the Economist's wrote:
> Bolstered by high incomes, American Zoomers’ home-ownership rates are higher than millennials’ at the same age (even if they are lower than previous generations’).
A chart of home ownership rates that end in 2017 could not possibly refute this claim given that Gen-Z would be too young to buy homes around the time that the data's source ends. The home ownership rate among under-35s increased from 34% in 2017 to 39% in 2023 (https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/07/younger-house...), so when Gen-Z started to enter their earliest feasible home-buying years the ownership rate was in a period of recovery. The Economist's claims seem to bear out.
The rest of the piece goes off on tangents largely unrelated to the financial outcomes related to Gen-Z relative to previous generations. For instance, it cites a pew survey on the percentage of young adults that support their parents. But it does not compare that against earlier decades, so there's no evidence in any change in rate over time. In fact the bulk of the piece shares data that aren't relevant. E.g. how does the racial breakdown of the subprime mortgages relate to incomes by age and birth year?
The dot-com era treatened and killed many jobs in banking (bank tellers and such). AI is now doing the same, but now it is threatening the jobs of consultants.
Not only did she gain $50k more in tenant improvement/free rent/et and other freebies that the brokers/lawers she did not get, but easily saved $10k to paying these "professionals".
I'm not saying lawyers and accountants are going to all be out of a job (at the end of the day, they do more than just comb over documents to find the needle in the haystack), but a lot of the manual grunt work can be automated there too.
The only way they can make it illegal to take the human out of the loop is if they ban self representation. Otherwise people will do research with AI and just present their findings in court. But the free/cheap lawyers are actually so much worse.If laws prevent self representation we would increase the inequality even more.
One can argue that hard labour is the one which isn't impacted but even those dont pay enough to break your body completely over unless you own your business, and even then, to say that AI/Robotics companies are definitely going to or are already trying to position themselves here too.
My point is that a lot of industries feel unsafe right now because of AI, but its just that tech has the most direct impact.
It’s lead to plenty of good as well, a luddite I am not. I love my tech. I love conversing with people online, I became a happy mIRC user well over 20 years ago, I use telegram & discord daily. I just really, really despise tech’s current trajectory. I grew up wanting this stuff to supplement my life, not control & rule over it. The days where I want to toss it all in the trash and run off to the woods are increasing all the time. I didn’t want an internet where i’m constantly having to ask myself every image… is this real? I certainly don’t want one that’s constantly surveilling me and I definitely don’t want one that’s about to threaten to lock me out, or up(!), the moment I commit wrongspeak.
The analogy would be a 17 year old kid passing his driving test and getting straight in a 500bhp rear wheel drive sports car. We as a society have just collectively done that over the last two decades. And it feels like we’re just about to take it nuclear with AI.
So we can dwell on all of that past or set ourselves some basic goals and ambitions to aim for. Refocus. Change the conversation.
Somebody responded to me earlier that “at least we have reusable rockets”. Do you know what I really want? It’s really quite basic - clean air, clean water and clean energy. Let’s collectively work to tick those three off the list, for every.single.soul here on this planet first, then after that, we can focus on making them free for everybody. Then we can set our sights on the stars.
Don't fall for the divide and conquer. You have agency, you can do your part to steer the ship if you can resist the learned helplessness of hatred.
AI is a tool. I enjoy using it as a search engine. But just like I don't trust everything on the internet, I don't blindly trust AI. AI's index the same information as search engines with additional retrieval error factored in.
There are deeply unprofitable modes of AI. The chat interfaces are, as I understand it, deeply unprofitable loss leaders whereas the enterprise API's and agentic stuff is profitable.
Maybe try to intensify your use of the unprofitable offerings if you you dislike what the AI companies stand for before the economics come back to earth for them?
It's about the greed, lies, fascism, and basically that AI is making almost everything it touches worse.
But down the road the AI bros promise us that this will reduce inequality and make human society better, somehow.
I really need to understand this shit and if anyone can weigh in on it I'd be most grateful. We will all eventually get replaced by AI and yet we need to pay Big AI to stay in the game. Even when nobody has any income.
I'm sure that there is someone here who can smack down this comment and put me in my place and give me a good and proper lesson in economics.
It is going to make human society better. And it already doing it.
The problem is neither you nor me are the part of the society. The AI bros are.
Perhaps you software engineers are in a bubble - people I know from accountants, portfolio managers to mechanical engineers are barely using AI - they use it more to tell jokes.
I think there is some mass confusion happening right now (psychosis even) and things are getting scary.
> "use AI make stuff and go forward for the win".
If anyone with AI access can do this, then what real value can one produce? For example, if one makes a nice little FizzBuzz widget, then why pay for their widget when I can just make my own? Sure, there is a cost to buy/time to recreate analysis to be had, but it's easier to recreate software now more than ever.
Shoving shitty products down customers throat was a bad idea from the start. And now there are even more reasons to hate it
CEOs love to get up and say "Hey, we are firing 1000 people because of this awesome AI" [1]
For people that like computers, AI is jacking up the price of electronics with CEOs saying things like "We don't even have a place to plug these cards in, we are just buying up whatever we can get" [2]. They are further causing memory manufacturers to simply discontinue consumer products [3]
Then there are the AI CEOs that love advertising the fact that their companies will eliminate huge swaths of the job market and make good paying jobs obsolete. [4]
Of course when the general public even starts to ask "ok, what is this and why should I care" a lot of the answers are "You just should, you'll be left behind" without actual explanations for why or how. [5]
And of course lets not forget that practically cartoonish villiny of the data centers being ramrodded through by bribing local politicians with false claims of tax benefits. All while being powered by massive amounts of fossil fuel burners. [6]
Yeah, people hate AI, because it seems be a bunch of out of touch CEOs that only talk to each other in glee about how awesome it will be to have no workers and how great it is that they have enough money and political influence to do anything they like regardless public sentiment.
It's a product that wasn't sold to the average joe, it was sold to the uber wealthy. It very clearly shows.
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
[3] https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
[4] https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-s...
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hTJUl4--8c
[6] https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/05/04/utah-data-center-fina...
Most people I know will claim to not like AI, but they happily continue to scroll their Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok feed that's full of it. Until they delete the app in protest and go read a book, little will change.
Even if that were true though, it seems like they can still resent the massively changed job market and career prospects they are graduating into, right?
