▲ 89 points
back
176 comments
How about now?
To be fair, I think that the biggest dangers of AI are just a continuation of the dangers of the Internet at large, namely the disintegration of a shared reality among society broadly. Echo chambers and personalization bubbles mean that everyone now is free to believe whatever they want to believe, and everyone else is crazy and wrong. AI just supercharges that, and especially makes it possible for the powers that be (i.e. owners of social media and communication channels) to subtly shift opinions in their favor.
I believe that what we're witnessing is a fundamental breakdown in the human psyche's ability, as it evolved historically, to handle the modern world. There are 2 other areas that I think are good analogies: food abundance and birth control. Humans evolved to love sex, which, historically, also guaranteed lots of children. But with birth control, humans can now have sex without the consequence of children, and this is actually putting a huge new evolutionary pressure on humanity - lots of people aren't procreating, so those that do will markedly shift human evolution. Similarly, humans evolved in an environment where food scarcity was common, and our current overabundance of food causes all sorts of havoc in first world societies.
Similarly, humans evolved socially to understand small groups, and then I would argue even larger and larger hierarchical groups. But the Internet, and AI, destroys those hierarchies, and is wreaking havoc on a society not prepared to deal with so many representations of "truth" where it is trivial to find an endless sea of people (or bots) who exactly agree with you.
The problem with the US is that it is a casino society.
Those who win the casino game will do well, and serve as poster material. Survivorship bias is at an all time high.
The less fortunate, even those who work hard, will suffer. This will only get worse with AI.
> Casino society
The other day I read that Americans have a lottery jackpot in the BILLIONS of dollars.
I’m not sure how to really put to words what I feel about that. Something is very, very wrong there.
I know of no one who is willing to work hard having a bad life other than for extremely bad luck, drugs or gambling. This is anecdotal certainly but I see nothing to discourage people from working hard.
I'm not so sure that AI will cause major harm as much as the AI fixation some people have to implement it.
It's the do-gooders who we should most fear will press the big shiny world-ending button.
Close to 2/3 Americans also believe in magic so I'm not sure what these studies are supposed to tell us.
The responses to the rest of the questions in the survey indicate (to me) that sentiments on AI, which is forced onto people more often than not, are largely negative.
> Close to 2/3 Americans also believe in magic so I'm not sure what these studies are supposed to tell us.
I think you're missing the point, as are many other comments on this post saying effectively, "These people don't even understand how AI works, so they can't make good predictions!"
It's true that most people can't make accurate predictions about AI, but this study is interesting because it represents people's current opinion, not future fact.
Right now, people are already distrustful of AI. This means that if you want people to adapt it, you need to persuade them otherwise. So far, most people's interactions with AI are limited to cheesy fake internet videos, deceptive memes, and the risk of shrinking labor demand.
In its short tenure in the public sphere, large language models have contributed nothing positive, except for (a) senior coders who can offload part of their job to Claude, and (b) managers, who can cut their workforce.
Why would people hold AI in high esteem?
Including many people in Silicon Valley. Apparently you’re not familiar with Nick Land.
So, who else is waiting for the Butlerian Jihad?
However, I don't think we're going to have to wait 11,000 years for it
Neither did the jihadists. The Jihad occurs 10000 years before the events of Dune, which is set approximately 12k years AD. So... any year now.
I think the job of causing major harm to humanity is still safely in the hands of humans for a while yet.
Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/
AI is not a tool. It is a new species being created before our eyes that will likely lead to the extinction of the human species and many others.
I used to believe in stuff like this, but I really don't now. AI is a tool. Imagine if we poisoned all the encyclopedias in the past where we would be.
“All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.” -Edward Gibbon
One thing I like about AI tech is that the developing world is really eager to adopt it and many use cases are free or affordable to them. My assistant in the phillipines has used it to substantially improve her communications, for instance.
Its much less popular in the USA and EU, but thats nice since it gives the developing world a chance to catch up.
> many use cases are free or affordable to them
Because the technology is so fast, efficient and easy to run locally themselves? Or because currently there are remote APIs/UIs that are heavily subsidized by VC money yet the companies behind them are yet to be profitable?
I agree that giving the developing world any ladders for catching up is a great thing, but I'm not sure this is that, it just happens to be that companies don't care about profit (yet) so things appear "free or affordable" to them, and when its gonna be time to make things realistic, we'll see how accessible it'll still be.
People on this forum should definitely be concerned about the techlash coming for data centers, I doubt many here would enjoy a future where compute follows the same trend as housing prices because it’s illegal to build more of either.
What about a future where carbon emissions follow the same trend as carbon emissions for the last 50 years
Agreed, seen a number of short form news pieces / docs on the effects of datacenter development across different parts of America. Pollution, noise, lights, water impacts, energy costs, etc. not a lot to like from them, and they create very few jobs in relation to the community.
The inevitable outcome of regulation on building data centers in the US is that they will be built in the Gulf states, China, or wherever else it is cheaper and better.
The bigger issue is the lack of power. ITs not like you can build that much capacity without adding power.
Suddenly adding 50gw of power demand in a state is going to drive up costs significantly.
Unlike housing, you can fit a useful amount of compute into a typical shirt pocket. Maybe a prohibition on data centers would help democratize compute again. Growing up on the utopian visions of the young internet where it was hoped that everyone would be an equal participant, the current state of things where a few enormous companies control most of the net, to the point where a single screwed up config file at one company can take down large swathes of the economy, is disgusting.
During the microcomputer revolution, hackers scoffed at people who used terminals to access time sharing systems. You don't own it, you don't control it, you're just a cog in the machine. Now, "hackers" are rushing to run everything on hardware owned and operated by companies with wealth and power that make the old IBM look like a kid's lemonade stand by comparison.
It won’t matter. Texas always exists. And then the Mid-West.
I would not enjoy that future, but I think it's important to ask why. Is the future of humanity at stake or just our job prospects?
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
I don't think people have a problem with compute based datacenters themselves
I feel like people have problem with AI oriented datacenters (which is becoming the majority of datacenters considering that datacenters make an shit ton of money selling AI aka shovels during gold rush)
Another thing is that these datacenters have very high levels of compute directly linked to the consumer of an application
As an example, you have a simple app, some message gets pushed by customer or database query or simple usage, its all good, at a datacenter level its power costs are miniscule
Now compare that to datacenters which have gpu's so they have applications like chatgpt (let's imagine) running on them, now these AI services are used by people themselves.
Now instead of simple applications and executions, Perhaps a trillion parameters models are running now. These are beyond computationally expensive even if we compare them to normal applications
Now I just searched and google's gemini runs 1.5 BILLION such prompts per day and chatgpt runs 2.5 BILLION prompts per day
Now, these prompts, they aren't stable all around the day, I have heard these to be very varying and when power consumption varies, it really impacts the performance of the grid itself
Another aspect is the sheer size, One would imagine that AI Bubble might give them more money and it does but the energy costs seems to me to be so high and perhaps also the fact that AI bubble gives these companies tons of free money which they "invest" aka buy/(lease?) year govt. contracts a lot of electricity
The govt. can only build so much capacity for these electricity and they (lobbying? and many other efforts) when get sold to datacenters really strains the electricity which thus increases the rates of electricity (and in a similar fashion perhaps water too) for the average american.
TLDR the way I read it: compute is cheap. There are always gonna be refurbished old compute which is gonna be too "old" (3-5 years because of deprication but that hardware is a beast) for these guys to use.
Nothing stops a simple guy who loves tech to open a mini datacenter perhaps :)
Who knows what might happen and I was extremely pessimistic about the datacenters not for these reasons but rather that ram prices were rising and I was worried that the whole industry might increase compute prices too but it seems that asus is opening up their ram production for consumers so starting out datacenters is possible
let's see what happens though. And I was worried a bit same as you but I feel like compute prices themselves are pretty chill/can remain chill. I understand the worries tho so looking forward to a discussion about it.
Is this an automated comment? It doesn't really make semantic sense, apart from typoes
It's hard to know what to make of a question like this. How did the respondents understand it, and what did the surveyors mean by it?
It seems obvious to me that, if we take the question literally, this will definitely happen. Already has, really. It's a powerful tool. Powerful tools are used to do many things, including harmful things. Good, useful technology like fertilizers and computers have caused major harm to humans, this will be no different.
As written, the question does not say anything about the harm outweighing the benefits. But I bet a lot of the people answering the question took that as implied.
Blog post from April: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-p...
ai doesn't kill people, ai companies kill people
Well, in this case, I think since people are killing themselves after talking to the AI, people are actually killing people. The AI company and the AI kills no one, so surely they must not be responsible at all for this.
And more in general, people kill people. And people help people.
Tools are tools. It is what we make of them what matters. AI on its own has no intentions, but questions like these feed into that believe that there is already AGI with a own agenda waiting to build terminators.
Do you believe this will hold of a self-training robot with agency?
How many of them believe that copyright infringement and job loss are "major harms"? How many believe that data centers put a Great Lake through their cooling system daily? Polls like this are meaningless.
Clickbait title. Summary of findings:
- High awareness, but the public is mostly uneasy while experts are more upbeat. Among U.S. adults, 40% say they’ve heard/read “a lot” about AI, and 51% say AI in daily life makes them more concerned than excited. In contrast, AI experts are far more positive: 47% are more excited than concerned.
- Chatbots: about half have tried them, and most users find them helpful. 47% of U.S. adults say they’ve used an AI chatbot; among users, 79% rate them at least “somewhat helpful” (11% extremely, 22% very, 46% somewhat).
- More Americans expect personal harm than benefit. When thinking about themselves, 43% say increased AI use is more likely to harm them than benefit them; 24% say it’s more likely to benefit them (33% not sure).
- The dominant expectation is job loss (overall and in many specific occupations). 64% think AI will lead to fewer jobs in the U.S. over the next 20 years (5% more jobs). For specific occupations, majorities expect fewer jobs for cashiers (73%), factory workers (67%), software engineers (48%), and journalists (59%).
- Trust is low for high-stakes decisions, and major concerns cluster around deception and privacy. 63% of U.S. adults say AI will not reach a point where they’d trust it to make important decisions for them (13% say it will). On risks, large shares are extremely/very concerned about AI being used to impersonate people (49%+29%), misuse personal information (40%+30%), and provide inaccurate information (34%+32%).
- People feel they have little control over AI in their lives - and want more. Only 14% of U.S. adults say they have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of control over whether AI is used in their life, while 55% say they’d like more control. AI experts similarly lean toward wanting more control (57%).
- Most want more AI regulation. Experts report low confidence in regulators and companies. U.S. adults are much more likely to worry the U.S. government will not go far enough regulating AI (58%) than that it will go too far (21%). AI experts are similar on direction (56% not far enough), but express low confidence in execution - only 13% have “a great deal/quite a bit” of confidence in the U.S. government to regulate AI effectively, and 16% say the same about U.S. companies developing/using AI responsibly.Interesting that it looks like News and Elections were where people thought AI would have the most negative impact. I’d consider it to be almost inconsequential for both, compared with stuff like employment and customer service - including government and healthcare - which I expect to be a dystopian nightmare.
1 in 3 thinks AI is the intern...
It’s already doing a piss-poor job dealing with suicidal teenagers.
Is there any reason to believe AI will be any better than social media when it comes to mental health?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/12/27/chatgpt...
and yet:
When you ask an AI like ChatGPT a question, what is it actually doing?
Survey of 2,301 American adults (August 1-6, 2025)
- Looking up the exact answer in a database: 45%
- Predicting what words come next based on learned patterns: 28%
- Running a script full of prewritten chat responses: 21%
- Having a human in the background write an answer: 6%
Source: Searchlight Institute
most survey respondents don't even _understand_ what AI is doing, so I am a bit skeptical to trust their opinions on whether it will cause harm
just absolve the people building them of any responsibility
"Tech" as a cohort is ideologically committed to one thing: minimum input with maximum quantifiable output (engagement, users, money). This works brilliantly in zero-sum competitions: markets, war, politics.
But here's the problem: societies aren't built on pure functionality.
They're built on intangibles.
Morals, aesthetics, the experience of meaning itself. These resist quantification to such a degree that homo sapiens has devoted centuries to exploring the intangibles: religion, philosophy, art (which have also been used as exploitation mechanisms, to be fair).
When you encounter Guernica [1] you're not processing a JPEG. You're standing before a distillation of one man's entire aesthetic and moral project. You're being overwhelmed by scale, by historical weight, by the presence of something that matters in a way that eludes specification. That mattering is what tech cannot compute.
The problem: tech culture has systematically reduced these intangibles to problems to be solved—UI patterns, conversion metrics, a marketing department tasked with fabricating the meaning the product itself cannot contain. Now companies are desperately hiring "storytellers" as patches. [2]
I believe this is one of the underlying reasons there is FUD about AI, and I'm not aware of any AI researcher who has bothered to address the intangibles (which is a very telling, but I might be wrong) but see Albert Borgmann's 'device paradigm' and Hubert Dreyfus on embodied meaning.
There's also "tech's" general attitude towards treating humans and their data like chattel for two decades. Try getting google tech support on the line some time.
There is a ton of repair work (and opportunity!) for 'tech' to engage in good faith with people if it wants to reshape society. But this requires extraordinary grace, a rejection of bottom-line thinking, and good-faith efforts to engage on reasonable terms.
When elites become so functionally detached from what actually sustains a civilization they stop being the ruling class and become illegitimate. History suggests what happens next [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(Picasso)
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-are-desperately-seeki...
Guns too. But we are missing the elephant in the room here: humans using them, specially the ones in key places of power.