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.
Besides people aren't dumb- the whole point about AI is to replace organic employees!
congrats, you have regulatory captured the entire industry and the U.S. government. everybody hates you because they can see money leaving their community to inflate the stock portfolio of some asshole on a yacht.
I see no evidence American’s don’t trust AI so I suspect loaded questions
j/k, but I'm pretty sure you could substitute "AI" with a few other keywords here that a lot of people use/depend on: Govt, Healthcare, Social Security, Airport security, heck maybe even science.
The real question is how do you scale something without eroding trust. Transparency has to be part of it but I doubt that it's the only piece of the puzzle and no matter how good your intentions are, there are always people that will refuse their trust (I'm not judging, it's just a fact). As a distributed systems person, I think systems in general work best when they can deal with mistrust and people choose to rather than being forced to use your system to solve their problems. AI is not there yet.
LLMs are cool and all but I feel like the average person is not really getting enough value out of them to keep the "wow this thing will probably make me jobless in 5 years" thoughts out.
Data-centres are being built at an astonishing rate, but frequently without the informed consent of locals and in a way that's a nuisance. It's possible to build data-centres that recycle water with near perfect efficiency, but many guzzle local water continuously because doing so is cheaper. They can be built to be quiet, but many are built so poorly that they seemingly violate noise pollution laws, which are magically not enforced. Those building data-centres could also build their own power generation capacity but, more typically, they rely on the local power grid and drive up prices. An immense amount of new GHG emissions is directly attributable to AI right when the world needs to be cutting back. There's also the immense sucking up of RAM and chips that has made computer hardware unaffordable for many.
That is a lot of negatives being absorbed by everyone before you even talk about the impact on jobs or where the profits are going. Regulatory capture may be working for now, but people are going to push back if they don't start seeing benefits for them personally or their communities. AI companies seem to be so preoccupied with driving each other out of business that they may completely lose their social license to continue operating.
Behave like criminals and, sooner or later, you'll be treated like criminals no matter who you have in your pocket.
When an employee says AI isn't speeding up his work, the only thing the CEO hears is "Wow, this employee is so scared of getting replaced that he's lying about how great AI is" and he will pick up the phone to Anthropic to buy more licenses.
It's sort of brilliant actually. No way to make a product grow fast enough without bypassing the employees and targeting the decision layer directly.
The US government already favors corruption as an approach so I am not sure theres anything to be done here.
>congrats, you have regulatory captured the entire industry and the U.S. government.
Incredibly cheap date.
>everybody hates you because they can see money leaving their community to inflate the stock portfolio of some asshole on a yacht.
Having issues parsing this. If you hate AI just dont pay for it?
i mean, it is still relentlessly demagogue like all the other roboslurs, but at least this one's fairly cute
So your evidence of why this is fake news is a very small anecdotal sample size in presumably an urban area of people doing mundane things with ai? Why should that any more reliable source of information as opposed to my anecdotal observations of plenty of white collar workers having negative sentiments on ai because they think they’re being forced out of livelihoods? Why should I believe you’re not spreading “fake news” because you have vested interests in AI?
People use it; they also understand that the end goal of AI is to automate away the vast majority of white collar jobs and enrich the capital class.
"I used the button they made biggest and closest to the top of the page."
Outside of programmers, almost no one has actually seen AI be useful for anything except do a barely acceptable job at a task they could have done better if they felt like it.
Not all programmers with AI mandates have seen this yet either.
It's quite common in modern society that people use things they don't particularly like, for a variety of reasons. One is that the society is being structured so that it's difficult to avoid its most toxic parts.
As it relates to AI, it certainly doesn't help that everyone is being told they need to learn AI or risk being eliminated by it.
A non-tech friend of mine who's writing a book uses it to get feedback on his writing. He's gotten pretty good at crafting prompts to get it to be fairly objective.
Another non-tech friend used it to do a lot of journaling and processing after a recent breakup.
A non-techy friend who happens to work in tech uses it to make presentations at work.
Another non-techy friend of mine who works at a tech startup uses it to browse LinkedIn and find people she's searching for.
I used it for
1. Filling bank forms, filling visa for South Africa
2. Understand movies and literature
3. For understanding public transport in new countries (pretty anxiety inducing)
4. As a 100x jump over Google search
5. Reading and answering emails
6. Fact checking dubious claims on the internet
7. Finding new music I might like
Incurious read on AI belongs to say 2024.
The biggest market for AI, possibly even bigger than tech, is mass manipulation, lying, and scamming. Destabilizing countries has never been easier now that social media and messengers allow believable lies and manipulation to spread like wildfire, and the AI industry has massively reduced the cost of believable lies.
Up until a few years ago, believable videos of politicians or famous people or people targeted for blackmail were expensive and required acting or VFX work. Now anyone can do it with a handful of dollars and half an hour to spend.
The industry is threatening to enrich the elite by taking people's jobs in economic uncertain times while at the same time resource hogging data centers are popping up all over the world like weeds. Big AI couldn't be more dislikable if they tried.
AI experts are feeling pretty good about the future of their field. Most Americans are not.
A new report from Pew Research Center released last week shows a sharp divide in how artificial intelligence is perceived by the people building it versus the people living with it. The survey, which includes responses from over 1,000 AI experts and more than 5,000 US adults, reveals a growing optimism gap: experts are hopeful, while the public is anxious, distrustful, and increasingly uneasy.
Roughly three-quarters of AI experts think the technology will benefit them personally. Only a quarter of the public says the same. Experts believe AI will make jobs better; the public thinks it will take them away. Even basic trust in the system is fractured: more than half of both groups say they want more control over how AI is used in their lives, and majorities say they don’t trust the government or private companies to regulate it responsibly.
That makes sense when you look at just how hard the US government has failed at basic tech regulation. Congress loves to haul big tech CEOs in for theatrical hearings where lawmakers fumble through questions about Section 230 that sound like they were written by someone who just discovered the internet yesterday.
Few Americans believe they have any agency in the AI-driven future.
“It seems like when you look at these … congressional hearings, they don’t understand it at all. I don’t know that I have faith that they would be able to bring on enough experts to understand it enough to regulate it, but I think it’s very important,” one academic expert said in the report.
The public’s skepticism about government AI regulation exists alongside the wildly ambitious claims of tech leaders about the future potential of AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he expects we may see “the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies” in 2025. That seems to show up in the data, too: few Americans believe they have any agency in the AI-driven future. Nearly 60 percent of US adults say they have little or no control over whether AI is used in their lives. That number isn’t much better among experts.
There are gender splits, too. Male AI experts are far more likely than women to say they feel optimistic and personally excited about AI. And when it comes to representation, both experts and the public agree that AI design reflects the perspectives of white men far more than women and Black or Hispanic communities. The diversity problem isn’t just about who builds the models — it’s baked into how people experience the technology.
While older generations debate the potential of AI, Gen Z is already living with it. A separate study released this week by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation finds that Gen Z is highly engaged with AI tools like ChatGPT or Copilot — 79 percent report using them, and almost half do so weekly. But that doesn’t mean they trust it. In fact, Gen Z is more likely to say AI makes them feel anxious (41 percent) than excited (36 percent). Just 27 percent say it makes them feel hopeful.
“They haven’t gotten to a point where they feel like the benefits outweigh the risks.”
“Gen Z, they don’t trust the government, they don’t trust big tech companies, they don’t trust the news,” Zach Hrynowski, author of the Gallup report, told The Verge.
Gen Z recognizes that AI will shape their future jobs and learning, but they’re wary of its effects. Nearly half think AI will harm their “ability to think critically.” And while most believe AI can help them work and learn more efficiently, only a third of Gen Z workers trust work done with or by AI as much as human output.
Schools and workplaces aren’t helping much, either. Most Gen Z students say their schools lack clear AI policies, and over half of Gen Z workers report the same about their employers. But the research shows that when institutions do have clear AI rules, young people are more likely to use the tools, trust them, and feel prepared for the future.
AI may be advancing fast, but trust is lagging behind. The systems are getting smarter, but the people are skeptical — especially the ones who will have to live with it the longest.
“They haven’t gotten to a point where they feel like the benefits outweigh the risks,” Hrynowski said.
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My point is that I just don't think the value-add for any of these are worth the existential dread most people have about losing their career. Then there's the scams, misinformation, trying to find a job when every recruiter is using AI to filter job listings, etc.
Pol here is abbreviated politician.
Frequently use it to come up with recipes when cooking, repair electrical equipment, or seek medical advice and results interpretation for my family.
It's pretty hard to imagine life without it at this point. I know it's possible, but like the internet, I would feel crippled by the lack of information and things that I can no longer easily do
'Seems' is a very dangerous word in this context.
> recipes when cooking
I used it for a recipe, gave it a brilliant and detailed prompt, it told me to put 10x a particular spice and it ruined the dish.
> seek medical advice and results interpretation for my family
good luck
> repair electrical equipment
what can go wrong, really
You can't tell a farmhand to "use AI" to stay competitive in the workspace when an army of robots is taking over their work. Unlike advancements in agricultural tools and robotics, AI is now threatening jobs in just about any field. The tone-deafness with which this force of uncertainty is being presented probably doesn't help. People can tell AI marketing is directed at their employer, not at themselves.
Same with ChatGPT. I use the thinking model and rarely (if not never) get obvious errors.
Recipies are one of the strongest areas given the low complexity and obvious training data. Im curious what it messed up on with.