Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says
-
This is like asking tobacco farmers what their thoughts are on smoking.
Al Gore's family thought that the political tide was turning against it, so they gave up tobacco farming in the late 1980s - and focused on politics.
-
See also; the cotton gin.
The cotton gin has been used as an argument for why slavery finally became unacceptable. Until then society "needed" slaves to do the work, but with the cotton gin and other automations the costs of slavery started becoming higher than the value.
-
Right?! It's literally just a messenger, honestly, all I expect from it is that it's an easy and reliable way of sending messages to my contacts. Anything else is questionable.
-
Machine learning? It’s already had a huge effect, drug discovery alone is transformative.
Machine learning is just large automated optimization, something that was done for many decades before, but the hardware finally reached a power-point where the automated searches started out-performing more informed selective searches.
The same way that AlphaZero got better at chess than Deep Blue - it just steam-rollered the problem with raw power.
-
or just propped up with something like UBI.
That depends entirely on how much UBI is provided.
I envision a "simple" taxation system with UBI + flat tax. You adjust the flat tax high enough to get the government services you need (infrastructure like roads, education, police/military, and UBI), and you adjust the UBI up enough to keep the wealthy from running away with the show.
Marshall Brain envisioned an "open source" based property system that's not far off from UBI: https://marshallbrain.com/manna
-
It would still require a revolution.
I would like to believe that we could have a gradual transition without the revolution being needed, but... present political developments make revolution seem more likely.
-
Replacing people is a good thing. It means less people do more work. It means progress. It means products and services will get cheaper and more available.
Replacing people is a good thing.
Yes, and no: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/g-s1-47352/why-economists-got-free-trade-with-china-so-wrong
-
The cotton gin has been used as an argument for why slavery finally became unacceptable. Until then society "needed" slaves to do the work, but with the cotton gin and other automations the costs of slavery started becoming higher than the value.
My understanding is that the cotton gin led to more slavery as cotton production became more profitable. The machine could process cotton but not pick it, so more hands were needed for field work.
Wiki:
The invention of the cotton gin caused massive growth in the production of cotton in the United States, concentrated mostly in the South. Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850. As a result, the region became even more dependent on plantations that used black slave labor, with plantation agriculture becoming the largest sector of its economy.[35] While it took a single laborer about ten hours to separate a single pound of fiber from the seeds, a team of two or three slaves using a cotton gin could produce around fifty pounds of cotton in just one day.[36] The number of slaves rose in concert with the increase in cotton production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850."
-
This is collateral damage of societal progress. This is a phenomenon as old as humanity. You can't fight it. And it has brought us to where we are now. From cavemen to space explorers.
Oh hey, it's the Nazi apologist. Big shock you don't give a fuck about other people's lives.
-
Maybe it’s because the American public are shortsighted idiots who don’t understand the concepts like future outcomes are based on present decisions.
-
Maybe that's because they're using AI to replace people, and the AI does a worse job.
Meanwhile, the people are also out of work.
Lose - Lose.
-
Maybe that's because they're using AI to replace people, and the AI does a worse job.
Meanwhile, the people are also out of work.
Lose - Lose.
Even if you're not "out of work", your work becomes more chaotic and less fulfilling in the name of productivity.
When I started 20 years ago, you could round out a long day with a few hours of mindless data entry or whatever. Not anymore.
A few years ago I could talk to people or maybe even write a nice email communicating a complex topic. Now chatGPT writes the email and I check it.
It's just shit honestly. I'd rather weave baskets and die at 40 years old of a tooth infection than spend an additional 30 years wallowing in self loathing and despair.
-
Everyone gains from progress. We've had the same discussion over and over again. When the first sewing machines came along, when the steam engine was invented, when the internet became a thing. Some people will lose their job every time progress is made. But being against progress for that reason is just stupid.
-
Oh hey, it's the Nazi apologist. Big shock you don't give a fuck about other people's lives.
-
Which are separate things from people's ability to financially support themselves.
People can have smartphones and tech the past didn't have, but be increasingly worse off financially and unable to afford housing.
And you aren't a space explorer.
People being economically displaced from innovation increasing productivity is good provided it happens at a reasonable place and there is a sufficient social saftey net to get those people back on their feet. Unfortunately those saftey nets dont exist everywhere and have been under attack (in the west) for the past 40 years.
-
Maybe it’s because the American public are shortsighted idiots who don’t understand the concepts like future outcomes are based on present decisions.
LLM can't deliver reliably what they promise and AGI based on it won't happen. So what are you talking about?
-
Everyone gains from progress. We've had the same discussion over and over again. When the first sewing machines came along, when the steam engine was invented, when the internet became a thing. Some people will lose their job every time progress is made. But being against progress for that reason is just stupid.
What progress are you talking about?
-
US experts who work in artificial intelligence fields seem to have a much rosier outlook on AI than the rest of us.
In a survey comparing views of a nationally representative sample (5,410) of the general public to a sample of 1,013 AI experts, the Pew Research Center found that "experts are far more positive and enthusiastic about AI than the public" and "far more likely than Americans overall to believe AI will have a very or somewhat positive impact on the United States over the next 20 years" (56 percent vs. 17 percent). And perhaps most glaringly, 76 percent of experts believe these technologies will benefit them personally rather than harm them (15 percent).
The public does not share this confidence. Only about 11 percent of the public says that "they are more excited than concerned about the increased use of AI in daily life." They're much more likely (51 percent) to say they're more concerned than excited, whereas only 15 percent of experts shared that pessimism. Unlike the majority of experts, just 24 percent of the public thinks AI will be good for them, whereas nearly half the public anticipates they will be personally harmed by AI.
-
I would agree with that if the cost of the tool was prohibitively expensive for the average person, but it’s really not.
It‘s too expensive for society already as it has stolen work from millions to even be trained with millions more to come. We literally cannot afford to work for free when the rich already suck up all that productivity increase we‘ve gained over the last century.
-
Translations apps would be the main one for LLM tech, LLMs largely came out of google's research into machine translation.
If that's the case and LLM are scaled up translation models shoehorned into general use, it makes sense that they are so bad at everything else.
