Paul Krugman: Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

[highplainsdem]

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-does-everyone-hate-ai

-snip-

First, we fear that AI will do terrible things because the companies selling it told us it would do terrible things. Last year, for example, Anthropic CEO Darius Amodei declared in an interview with Axios that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs and drive overall unemployment as high as 20 percent within 1 to 5 years.

-snip-

Second, many ordinary people view AI negatively because they feel that it is being forced on them.

-snip-

Third, datacenters are a highly visible reminder of AI’s costs. Datacenters occupy huge tracts of land — one proposed site in Utah will be twice the size of Manhattan. They guzzle electricity and water. When they generate some of their own power, they create major local pollution. Not surprisingly, there is intense opposition to datacenter construction. According to a Reuters Ipsos poll, 57 percent of Americans — two-thirds of Democrats and half of Republicans — would oppose a datacenter in their neighborhood. Only 14 percent would support one.

-snipping- paragraphs about tech companies in general having lost the public's trust even before they started peddling generative AI-

Finally, AI is tightly linked in the public mind with the tech oligarchs who are pushing it. There is widespread awareness of the growing concentration of wealth and power at the top and how this is distorting our politics and harming our society. Aside from the MAGA faithful, Americans overwhelmingly favor government policies to reduce wealth inequality:

-snip-

And Krugman chose this for his musical coda today:

[dalton99a]

1. It has become clear that our zillionaire tech overlords are insatiable greedy parasites who hate humans.

[SheltieLover]

2. Because it is predicated upon stolen materials & rots brains.

[Snarkoleptic]

3. We're paying a steep price in terms of quality of life, water, noise, etc...

all so some weirdo can go on twitter/XAI, upload a photo of random person and have AI digitally show what they'd look like naked.

[Coventina]

4. AI is destroying critical thinking in my students.

They don't want to learn *anything*.

They want computers to tell them what to think.

[Blue Owl]

6. Now that is troubling indeed

And just what the Musk-types are salivating over — a population of brain-dead serf robots they can control.

Pure evil!

[dickthegrouch]

5. *MY* biggest fear is the lack of integrity of much of the information it's being fed with

Until it can sort the wheat from the chaff, it's utterly useless in most common fields of public discourse.
When the words of POTUS are almost completely fabricated, the pronouncements of major departments of the government are utterly unreliable, even the law is as malleable as putty, AI cannot be expected to get anything right. EVER!

Far too many governments have given themselves the right to lie.

Humans can't discern the lies. Therefore mere mortals cannot possibly program anything to do so.
Even majority consensus among a majority of liars is still a LIE.

[Melon]

8. This is publicly available AI

In a locked down system, the information that the AI learns from it tightly controlled, thus the output and learning are predictable.

Go to ChatGPT. As it how many R’s are in the word strawberry? Part of its data source are people misspelling the word. You end up with bad outcomes.

Don’t believe that our military and top tier corporations are using the same data set as you to get your answers.

[Bettie]

7. Why do we fear that AI will do terrible things?

Have you seen who is making and promoting it?

And humans have been thinking on their own since....well, the first human had a thought.

The beauty of humanity is that we aren't computers. We're living, breathing people who have emotions and biases...and that isn't a bad thing.

I have no interest in "have your novel written by AI in 90 minutes"....I want to write what comes to me. I want to READ people's ideas, not an AI novel built off of a few sentences someone spoke into a chat bot.

If I need advice, I want to talk to another person, not a programmed bot that will eventually tell me that the solution to depression is suicide.

I don't want an "AI Companion"....I want real people who I can see and laugh with, people who have their own reactions to things, not a simulated reaction based on, again, what it thinks I want to hear.

Oh, and I am just sick to death of having to check each and every image and story I read to find out if it is real or some AI slop.