[mullingitover]

> why does a computer making money by learning everything from everyone upset people so? It’s the same thing!

The majority of the population, sitting outside the VC bubble, views AI unfavorably. That's not my hot take, that's a fact from the NYT survey published today.

It's going to be hilarious when VCs, having expropriated the IP of the entire internet, build The Layoff Machine That Does Everything Without Workers, and then the voters decide to just...enthusiastically expropriate that, and we end up with Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

[llm_nerd]

>The majority of the population, sitting outside the VC bubble, views AI unfavorably.

Sure, where AI means threatens my job or my skills, people view it unfavourably.

But then they use it. They're all using it. People's rhetoric seldom matches their actions.

>enthusiastically expropriate that, and we end up with Fully Automated Luxury Communism

Maybe in other countries, initially, but the US is very firmly a plutocracy, and has a populace that will very happily vote against their own interests because the plutocrat-owned media told them to. And yeah, it is very rapidly approaching the point where there is going to be zero chance of a revolution even if people opened their eyes.

Which is precisely why the US is now threatening other countries as well, because plutocracy is threatened by rational, educated, better managed countries. Canada, for instance, is an example that country doesn't have to revert to being an idiocracy, so it's first in the crosshairs.

[danaris]

> They're all using it.

[Citation needed]

I know many more people who do not use AI than who use it, and many more who refuse to use AI than people who are enthusiastic about it.

Given your username, you are almost certainly in a bubble—an echo chamber—that makes it seem to you as though "everyone is using it." I recommend getting outside that bubble and talking to non-technical people outside your usual circles, especially people in the arts and humanities.

[sethammons]

My blue collar buddy in water treatment uses ai to summarize reports and fix up emails. My retired neighbor who "doesn't do technology" was having an ai conversation on a product he was thinking of buying. I ordered through a voice kiosk ai at the drive-through last week. I am surprised how fast it is propagating.

[danaris]

But, see, this is part of the problem:

Most of the people I hear from who use AI say everyone they know uses AI.

Most of the people I hear from who don't use AI say no one they know uses AI.

It seems to me that we've got competing bubbles here. But the statistics certainly show that, leaving aside whether they use it, most people don't like it or want it.

...I think it's also worth noting that AI usage is likely to be "louder" than AI avoidance in many cases—that is, whichever side of this one falls on, it's easier to detect someone pasting from ChatGPT directly into emails, or complaining that Gemini told them you would sell them XYZ, than it is to detect someone who's just keeping on the way they've always been.

[mullingitover]

> But then they use it. They're all using it. People's rhetoric seldom matches their actions.

I don't see any contradiction. I criticize the hell out of guns and want them strictly controlled, and yet I own one. `¯\_(ツ)_/¯`

People can use AI and still demand that all of society receive the benefits, instead of a small group of oppressors.

[danaris]

The problem is, there's an intermediate step required there: the voters will need to get rid of the Republican Party lock, stock, and barrel if they ever want to make a genuinely-socialist move like that. And that's going to be made much, much more difficult by all the measures Trump and his cronies are putting in place to disenfranchise everyone who refuses to bow to him.