[lkrubner]

The problem is more general. Trust in American institutions peaked in the 1950s. Starting in the 1960s, Americans began to slowly withdraw from institutions, and also distrust them. Robert Putnam covers this in his book "Bowling Alone." Americans stopped going to the local meetings of their local town government, and Americans became more suspicious of local decisions. Americans became less interested in local news and more interested in national news (partly that was the shift in news-consumption-habits away from the local paper and towards national television). Americans slowly became more likely to believe in conspiracy theories of all kinds. During the 1970s, Americans demanded more democracy from their institutions, and many reforms were passed, including the Sunshine Laws, that were passed in almost all 50 states, making government more transparent, yet Americans became less trusting despite the greater transparency. Also during the 1970s, Americans demanded that the inner workings of Congress be made more democratic, and so the committee chairmen were stripped of their powers and each committee became purer in its democracy, which caused more procedural motions, which slowed down the actual work, which caused Americans to trust Congress less. Barbara Sinclair wrote a famous book (at least it was famous within the world of political science) called "Unorthodox Lawmaking" which tracks the breakdown of the normal lawmaking processes of Congress during the period from 1970 to 2015. All of these trends were mild from 1960 to 2000 and then they accelerated after 2000. Americans became less trusting of church, government, charity, the police, the teachers, the newspapers, the Fed, the CIA, the FBI, the unions, the Boy Scouts, and Americans became more divided over the military. There was an increase in general paranoia. The current frenzy over AI is part of the longer trend.

From what I can tell, all of America's institutions were reformed during the era after 1970 and yet Americans became less trustful of those same institutions. It is likely that some of the reforms had negative side effects, especially the attempt to make the committees inside of Congress more pure in their democracy, thereby making them less effective.

[doom2]

It doesn't help when a political candidate campaigns on promises of "radical transparency" and breaking up "corruption" and "the deep state" in DC and then gets in power and is even less transparent, more corrupt, and filling the DC bureaucracy with more yes men than the person before him.

How are you supposed to build trust with those kinds of outcomes?

[lkrubner]

Nothing you said is true. The fact that you didn't name a single person is an example of the style of reasoning that has increasingly shaped USA discourse over the last 60 years. If you don't have specifics then you are simply giving into the trend towards distrust. Since 1960 every institution in the USA has been made more transparent and more directly democratic and yet this has done nothing to increase trust in those institutions. The distrust comes first and the distrust does not reference anything in reality. If Americans are more worried about corruption when corruption is decreasing then something is going on in the minds of Americans which does not have a correspondence with any external reality. Likewise, Americans are increasingly convinced that crime is increasing when every statistic we have shows that the crime wave lasted from 1960 to 1990 and has been in decline since 1990. Again, that Americans are more worried about crime when crime is decreasing shows that the concern about crime is being driven by something other than crime. The distrust comes first. The distrust shapes people's perception, separate from facts. The distrust shapes people's narratives, in opposition to the facts.

[TheCoelacanth]

It's pretty obvious that they are referring to a specific person and which specific person they are referring to.

[te_293845632834]

I think it's more than that. I have never seen a new technology so explicitly promoted -- even vastly oversold, in my opinion -- as "we're going to take every single white collar job". Replacing humans. That seems to be the all-encompassing vision of what execs are pushing for AI.

Now, from my stance, this grab bag of machine learning technology that is thrown under the "AI" banner is not even remotely good enough for this. It is "slop"-y and "hallucination" prone. Attempts at "creative" efforts are monolithic, without a distinctive voice, often with bizarre errors. The technology can alternate between being extremely helpful to being maddingly a waste of time, in the later case given you 10 solutions for an issue that are all wrong.

And yet, the C-suite types from Anthropic and Microsoft and others are preaching, again and again, their vision that all white collar jobs will be wiped out in 18 months and similar (just one example -- https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-s...).

Certainly, such banter has noticeably impacted entry level hires at the moment. But beyond that, one gets the impression that current tech execs are misanthropic and generally give two flips about humanity, all the better (at least, so they think) for their profits. It seems like, rather than promoting the use cases for machine learning which will improve and help advance society (I certainly can think of some things that have and might be done), the entire point of the giant amounts of capex being spent is to destroy jobs (the foundation of current capitalism) and make things worse off for everyone.

I agree that institutional trust has declined over the last decades, and unfortunately current technology execs are playing a part. I am old enough to actually remember the Google "Don't Be Evil" days. What happened?