I often wonder how different AI sentiment would be today if all of the layoffs that were opportunistically blamed on AI by the company CEOs were instead blamed on the real reason (likely pandemic related over hiring). The root of the backlash started as a result of all those “AI” layoffs and the hyperscaler CEOs gloating how everybody was going to lose their job due to AI. So in the end, they reap what they sow. A growing backlash that is not going away anytime soon.
The real reason is "make number go up". A few years ago, you showed the stock market (or your investors if you weren't listed yet) how amazing a company you were by hiring people like crazy, even if you didn't need them, and giving them all sorts of perks, including (but not limited to) home office. Now, the stock market wants to see blood, so you have to sacrifice people - not because you're actually losing money, but because you're not making as much profit as the stock market thinks you should, and therefore your shares are "underperforming".
The best people can do is to "vote with the wallets" aka attention: like social media, avoid using AI altogether no matter how "pervasive" they become, they will soon realize they won't need it as much as they think- overcome the addiction and brainwashing...
It’s the constant drumbeat of “AI will take your job.”
It’s the constant news of “layoffs because AI makes us more productive.”
It’s the constant background discussion of UBI because no one will have jobs anymore.
It’s knowing that, in the US, UBI will never come.
It’s the feeling that the billionaires of Silicon Valley are getting rich and there isn’t even a “learn to code” path to wealth anymore.
It’s knowing that data centers will create problems in your neighborhood: the price of power and water will go up, the amount of undeveloped land down, and you don’t even get jobs out of it.
For fuck’s sake, it’s not about the thousands of Mag7 tech workers losing their jobs. That’s just a symptom, like all the other symptoms, of this weirdly dystopian future that the AI companies keep telling us is inevitable.
Another part of the problem is our lax regulatory "anything goes" environment which puts no guardrails on how AI can be used / abused. For example, eventually nearly everyone needs healthcare and the idea you might be denied or fighting AI to get a claim accepted is nightmare fuel enough.
The current wave of AI companies did this to themselves. Had things moved more slowly and actively worked with all the affected industries, I suspect people would be far less interested in seeing the technology fail.
It's funny how easily you can differentiate people in the tech industry who spend all their time with others in the tech industry from those who don't.
The former either seem puzzled about the general public's anger at AI or dismissive of it ("they don't really hate it - look at ChatGPT usage!", "they only hate it because they've been misled about water usage!" and so on).
Non-techies aren't as stupid as people in the tech industry think. Normies can see their social media feeds filling up with slop. They see people in their social circles who can no longer hold a normal conversation without feeding everything into ChatGPT. And - most importantly, I suspect - they are seeing the plan they've built their lives around - get your kids to do well in school, get them into college so they can have a good career and make enough to pay of the loans that plan will require - being casually dismissed by AI boosters ("they'll be plenty of jobs, we just don't know what they are yet!").
Here's a clue for people who don't understand the backlash: if you don't understand that stability has value on its own, then you lack a basic understanding of what more people actually care about.
Is there room for people who are already in the acceptance phase? We started aggressively adopting AI in my company this year. I think I disliked (though never hated) it for a few days, but it’s a systemic change that I can’t just push back against. I don’t believe that strong public opinion can stop technological development either—just take nuclear for example.
I think that the concerns underlying the outrage are real and honestly valid, but the question I’m asking now isn’t “how to stop it” but “what now”? Because economies are cyclical and if it wasn’t AI it’d have been something else that would threaten our survival, and there are many good alternatives right now: climate change and war.
...while at the same time the pro-AI supporters are also growing steadily, as countless people discover how how generative AI has lowered the bar to creating content beyond what they could before.
All that's going to happen is people will "voluntarily" take it away from themselves.
The fearmongers will tell stories about biological or chemical weapons. It'll be things you could learn from a textbook - something like mercury molecules or cultivating rabies. People will vote to ban AI.
The puritans will clutch their pearls because it can be used to make porn they don't like. They'll vote to ban AI.
People who are afraid of losing their jobs will make tangential arguments about copyright violations. They'll vote to ban AI.
So citizens won't be allowed to use AI directly.
Instead, there will be regulatory capture. Microsoft and Apple will pay fees for compliance testing (bribes). Then they'll serve you a dumbed down version you can't escape. "I see you're trying to analyze numbers. Click here for a free signup to Office 365!".
The social media sites will make sure you still have access to create rage bait slop. That improves engagement.
Big software companies will pay for bug finding services. Small open source projects won't have the money.
If you're upset by AI, you should ask yourself if that's part of the plan. Because there's a lot of money to be made and power to be stripped from citizens if everything above comes true.
There are many cheap, open models available on the vLLM engine: https://huggingface.co/models?other=vllm. This includes gpt-oss, LLaMa, and Gemma. This is in addition to Qwen, Deepseek, Mistral, Kimi, GLM, and Poolside.
Is there any precedent you’re referencing? Many things that are expensive, slow, scarce, or bad are going to become cheap, fast, abundant, and awesome. Historically people like that a lot.
I just have trouble seeing how we get to there from here. Vote to ban AI? Has anything like that happened before?
If you read the article, it's mainly about data centers. Which is understandable regardless of your feelings about the technology. There's a ton of money, energy, labor, water, etc. going into building and operating data centers. It's a big change and a big topic for a lot of local governments. Because there's so much money involved and local government is so dysfunctional, there's also at least the appearance of the public will being given short shrift.
Then you add in on top of that people hearing that everyone's job is in jeopardy, like right now, even if it's not really true. Plus rumors about how untrustworthy people like Sam Altman are. Not to mention that they are San Francisco elites. Lawsuits. Cozying up to Trump. Etc. It's not surprising most of the sentiment around AI is incredibly negative and getting more negative by the day.
Americans aren’t in favor of being driven into unemployment and poverty? How dare they!
Companies have their relationship with people, specifically employees, backwards. What percentage of companies out there are truly needed? What percentage solely exist because people have some surplus money to play with?
No one needs Microsoft or Google products. No one needs overpriced Apple crap. AI means jack shit to almost 100% of Americans. Streaming services are one bad day away from ruin. We’ve seen what piracy can do. Now we have faster, better internet. Food delivery services RIP. I buy so little from Amazon these days that I’m questioning the $15 per month value of Prime.
I hope we see society correct course and go back to how it was in the 90’s, before everything went to shit. No social media. No smart phones. Going out more. Less digital noise. Physical media from physical stores. The list goes on…
Why would you only rollback to the 90s. Pretty sure TV was evil and destroying culture. And Rock and roll that was devastating, so we gotta roll back at least to the 1930's. That would be a fitting era to recreate.
Were you around in the 90s? People really were more optimistic then, at least in the US. It wasn't perfect, but it really did feel like things were getting better. The Clinton administration had to start doing studies about whether paying off the national debt would be globally destabilizing! We really were talking about the "end of history". We thought the Internet would bring people together and end bigotry.
If we roll back 10,000 years, people often worked less hours per week. No class society where we have to serve the rich. Drinking alcohol, painting caves. Sounds pretty good.
All of these companies and their products and services are getting worse and more expensive. If their hostility to customers has not been punished so far then what reason is there to believe it ever will be?
The time to have quit Prime was years ago, before the price hikes, the degradation of service, their complicity in the sale of counterfeit goods, etc. People didn't leave. They won. They know they can do what they want now.
I mean, people are semi developed selfish tribal monkeys. It must hurt us significantly before we are willing to solve the issue.
Not a best way to so virtually anything.
If you can make the masses fight for 2 instead of 1, then you guarantee that you don't get 1. If instead, the masses fight for 1, they've got a chance of getting it. You present AI as a false dichotomy: no AI or AI for billionaires. But 2 is a fantasy. There will be AI.
Any of us arguing for (1) get shouted down by the very people who would benefit most from it. The masses do the job of the billionaires.
Most utopian science fiction has AI doing the work and humans leading a life of leisure (e.g. Culture novels). Dystopian futures have AI keeping the rabble under control (Neil Asher's Owner Trilogy, Elysium). Time to choose folks.
I agree with your logic, but you should replace 2 with "AI used by governments only". The haters would have more luck getting rid of nuclear weapons than putting the AI cat back in the bag. Governments will use it for surveillance. Think "sentiment analysis" to make sure you're not a terrorist.
#1 seems like the worst possible dystopia. We should shoot for #2 and have #3 as a fallback. The Culture is the worst dystopia I am capable of imagining.
People don't see the safety net, that's the problem. Big tech hopes that bigdiks gonna bring in UBI and the like to ease the pepl, but it's nowhere near on the horizon. And it will be hard to persuade the ruling psychos to let the millions of their slaves running amok.
So pepl gonna riot and hunt down AI researchers and ceos and gonna burn them at the stake and then eat them :D. Musk will tell the sect members to hunt down Sam and the first one who bites his calves will be awarded a cybertruck.
Oh and data centers gonna be looted after hungry pepl eat the security guards and the mercenaries. Also remember everyone have rifles and gatlings buried in the garden :DDD.
While the west clutches their pearls, China roars ahead on manufacturing, energy, and AI. Unqualified military supremacy will soon follow. I weep for my children.
Bunch of idiots. We’re all going to lose our jobs but you can only hold back the inevitable for so long. This idiot populous has a total inability to see past the extremely short term. What exactly is going to happen you’re going to block the data centers. You’re going to make it hard to make technical progress and then someone else will eat your lunch and now you’re just poor.
Personally I'm not convinced by pro-accelerationism arguments. Why shouldn't technical progress be hard? Why shouldn't the inevitable be held back as long as possible? What does it mean to have someone else eat our lunch in terms of AI?
It’s because you live in a world with competitors now this isn’t the 60s and the 70s anymore. There are legitimately quite a few countries that can effectively compete. Someone else eating your lunch in this case means you’re poor, have no global power and life for all of us will be worse than what we currently enjoy.
I often wonder how different AI sentiment would be today if all of the layoffs that were opportunistically blamed on AI by the company CEOs were instead blamed on the real reason (likely pandemic related over hiring). The root of the backlash started as a result of all those “AI” layoffs and the hyperscaler CEOs gloating how everybody was going to lose their job due to AI. So in the end, they reap what they sow. A growing backlash that is not going away anytime soon.
The real reason is "make number go up". A few years ago, you showed the stock market (or your investors if you weren't listed yet) how amazing a company you were by hiring people like crazy, even if you didn't need them, and giving them all sorts of perks, including (but not limited to) home office. Now, the stock market wants to see blood, so you have to sacrifice people - not because you're actually losing money, but because you're not making as much profit as the stock market thinks you should, and therefore your shares are "underperforming".
The best people can do is to "vote with the wallets" aka attention: like social media, avoid using AI altogether no matter how "pervasive" they become, they will soon realize they won't need it as much as they think- overcome the addiction and brainwashing...
I think you'll find the American public is less motivated by how well-treated Mag7 software developers believe themselves to be.
The public statements of frontier labs' CEOs that generative models will replace human workers have been front page news for months.
It’s not about that.
It’s the constant drumbeat of “AI will take your job.”
It’s the constant news of “layoffs because AI makes us more productive.”
It’s the constant background discussion of UBI because no one will have jobs anymore.
It’s knowing that, in the US, UBI will never come.
It’s the feeling that the billionaires of Silicon Valley are getting rich and there isn’t even a “learn to code” path to wealth anymore.
It’s knowing that data centers will create problems in your neighborhood: the price of power and water will go up, the amount of undeveloped land down, and you don’t even get jobs out of it.
For fuck’s sake, it’s not about the thousands of Mag7 tech workers losing their jobs. That’s just a symptom, like all the other symptoms, of this weirdly dystopian future that the AI companies keep telling us is inevitable.
You left out the computer gamers crowd are mad about the high price of memory, a group that is a very vocal crowd in all the tech circles.
This is assuming AI will take our jobs as opposed to making more mess for us to clean up.
I'm worried many companies no longer care much if they make a mess or a way to hold them accountable.
Mag7?
Magnificent 7, the new FAANG where Netflix got swapped to NVIDIA and Tesla got added.
The pandemic over hiring that ended 4 years ago?
Things take time to play out!
Yes
industrial revolution also played a part too? :)
The only way AI recoups the investment is if it replaces all our jobs.
It might be literally impossible but that's what the numbers are.
Another part of the problem is our lax regulatory "anything goes" environment which puts no guardrails on how AI can be used / abused. For example, eventually nearly everyone needs healthcare and the idea you might be denied or fighting AI to get a claim accepted is nightmare fuel enough.
So far it seems like AI is helping the little guy fight the bills more?
(That can of course change very quickly, yes)
1. So AI companies royally screwed over artists and other culture workers.
2. Culture workers are a big part of who sets the narrative for the general population - especially young people.
3. Less than 1/5 of Gen Z are optimistic about AI and the number is falling: (https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skep...)
The current wave of AI companies did this to themselves. Had things moved more slowly and actively worked with all the affected industries, I suspect people would be far less interested in seeing the technology fail.
It's funny how easily you can differentiate people in the tech industry who spend all their time with others in the tech industry from those who don't.
The former either seem puzzled about the general public's anger at AI or dismissive of it ("they don't really hate it - look at ChatGPT usage!", "they only hate it because they've been misled about water usage!" and so on).
Non-techies aren't as stupid as people in the tech industry think. Normies can see their social media feeds filling up with slop. They see people in their social circles who can no longer hold a normal conversation without feeding everything into ChatGPT. And - most importantly, I suspect - they are seeing the plan they've built their lives around - get your kids to do well in school, get them into college so they can have a good career and make enough to pay of the loans that plan will require - being casually dismissed by AI boosters ("they'll be plenty of jobs, we just don't know what they are yet!").
Here's a clue for people who don't understand the backlash: if you don't understand that stability has value on its own, then you lack a basic understanding of what more people actually care about.
Is there room for people who are already in the acceptance phase? We started aggressively adopting AI in my company this year. I think I disliked (though never hated) it for a few days, but it’s a systemic change that I can’t just push back against. I don’t believe that strong public opinion can stop technological development either—just take nuclear for example.
I think that the concerns underlying the outrage are real and honestly valid, but the question I’m asking now isn’t “how to stop it” but “what now”? Because economies are cyclical and if it wasn’t AI it’d have been something else that would threaten our survival, and there are many good alternatives right now: climate change and war.
We truly need to put a stop to leaving our citizens defenseless against nation-state propaganda campaigns coming out of China and Russia.
Are you implying this story is Chinese or Russian propaganda?
Everything is Chinese/Russian propaganda unless it comes from a respectable source like BBC
Non-paywalled link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/the-american-rebellion...
Thanks for that post.
Checking MSN is a good alternative to archive.ph, or otherwise searching for the author and title?
...while at the same time the pro-AI supporters are also growing steadily, as countless people discover how how generative AI has lowered the bar to creating content beyond what they could before.
All that's going to happen is people will "voluntarily" take it away from themselves.
The fearmongers will tell stories about biological or chemical weapons. It'll be things you could learn from a textbook - something like mercury molecules or cultivating rabies. People will vote to ban AI.
The puritans will clutch their pearls because it can be used to make porn they don't like. They'll vote to ban AI.
People who are afraid of losing their jobs will make tangential arguments about copyright violations. They'll vote to ban AI.
So citizens won't be allowed to use AI directly.
Instead, there will be regulatory capture. Microsoft and Apple will pay fees for compliance testing (bribes). Then they'll serve you a dumbed down version you can't escape. "I see you're trying to analyze numbers. Click here for a free signup to Office 365!".
The social media sites will make sure you still have access to create rage bait slop. That improves engagement.
Big software companies will pay for bug finding services. Small open source projects won't have the money.
If you're upset by AI, you should ask yourself if that's part of the plan. Because there's a lot of money to be made and power to be stripped from citizens if everything above comes true.
There are many cheap, open models available on the vLLM engine: https://huggingface.co/models?other=vllm. This includes gpt-oss, LLaMa, and Gemma. This is in addition to Qwen, Deepseek, Mistral, Kimi, GLM, and Poolside.
Is there any precedent you’re referencing? Many things that are expensive, slow, scarce, or bad are going to become cheap, fast, abundant, and awesome. Historically people like that a lot.
I just have trouble seeing how we get to there from here. Vote to ban AI? Has anything like that happened before?
If you read the article, it's mainly about data centers. Which is understandable regardless of your feelings about the technology. There's a ton of money, energy, labor, water, etc. going into building and operating data centers. It's a big change and a big topic for a lot of local governments. Because there's so much money involved and local government is so dysfunctional, there's also at least the appearance of the public will being given short shrift.
Then you add in on top of that people hearing that everyone's job is in jeopardy, like right now, even if it's not really true. Plus rumors about how untrustworthy people like Sam Altman are. Not to mention that they are San Francisco elites. Lawsuits. Cozying up to Trump. Etc. It's not surprising most of the sentiment around AI is incredibly negative and getting more negative by the day.
Americans aren’t in favor of being driven into unemployment and poverty? How dare they!
Companies have their relationship with people, specifically employees, backwards. What percentage of companies out there are truly needed? What percentage solely exist because people have some surplus money to play with?
No one needs Microsoft or Google products. No one needs overpriced Apple crap. AI means jack shit to almost 100% of Americans. Streaming services are one bad day away from ruin. We’ve seen what piracy can do. Now we have faster, better internet. Food delivery services RIP. I buy so little from Amazon these days that I’m questioning the $15 per month value of Prime.
I hope we see society correct course and go back to how it was in the 90’s, before everything went to shit. No social media. No smart phones. Going out more. Less digital noise. Physical media from physical stores. The list goes on…
Why would you only rollback to the 90s. Pretty sure TV was evil and destroying culture. And Rock and roll that was devastating, so we gotta roll back at least to the 1930's. That would be a fitting era to recreate.
Were you around in the 90s? People really were more optimistic then, at least in the US. It wasn't perfect, but it really did feel like things were getting better. The Clinton administration had to start doing studies about whether paying off the national debt would be globally destabilizing! We really were talking about the "end of history". We thought the Internet would bring people together and end bigotry.
If we roll back 10,000 years, people often worked less hours per week. No class society where we have to serve the rich. Drinking alcohol, painting caves. Sounds pretty good.
All of these companies and their products and services are getting worse and more expensive. If their hostility to customers has not been punished so far then what reason is there to believe it ever will be?
The time to have quit Prime was years ago, before the price hikes, the degradation of service, their complicity in the sale of counterfeit goods, etc. People didn't leave. They won. They know they can do what they want now.
It would be nice, but is it likely to happen?
As Musk said, they were the bootloaders of AI. Finally we get gargantuan monster battles akin to Godzilla vs. King Kong.
It's going to get worse, way worse, before it gets better. You know that right?
I mean, people are semi developed selfish tribal monkeys. It must hurt us significantly before we are willing to solve the issue. Not a best way to so virtually anything.
I'll just keep repeating this:
There are three options:
1. AI owned by everyone
2. No AI
3. AI owned by billionaires
If you can make the masses fight for 2 instead of 1, then you guarantee that you don't get 1. If instead, the masses fight for 1, they've got a chance of getting it. You present AI as a false dichotomy: no AI or AI for billionaires. But 2 is a fantasy. There will be AI.
Any of us arguing for (1) get shouted down by the very people who would benefit most from it. The masses do the job of the billionaires.
Most utopian science fiction has AI doing the work and humans leading a life of leisure (e.g. Culture novels). Dystopian futures have AI keeping the rabble under control (Neil Asher's Owner Trilogy, Elysium). Time to choose folks.
#2 is impossible now that oss models are readily available and nobody would know you are using them.
I wish that those who support #2 looked a lot less like #3.
For that matter, I wish those who were pro-AI were more strictly supportive of #1.
I agree with your logic, but you should replace 2 with "AI used by governments only". The haters would have more luck getting rid of nuclear weapons than putting the AI cat back in the bag. Governments will use it for surveillance. Think "sentiment analysis" to make sure you're not a terrorist.
What does #1 actually mean in practical terms? Collective ownership of a giant data center and all the CPUs, GPUs, and DRAM needed to do AI?
#2 is not really an option though. It's more like #1 or #3.
#1 seems like the worst possible dystopia. We should shoot for #2 and have #3 as a fallback. The Culture is the worst dystopia I am capable of imagining.
Yeah I'll pick two, thanks.
4. regulation... well, that's a no go in the US. So what is the 5th option?
People don't see the safety net, that's the problem. Big tech hopes that bigdiks gonna bring in UBI and the like to ease the pepl, but it's nowhere near on the horizon. And it will be hard to persuade the ruling psychos to let the millions of their slaves running amok.
So pepl gonna riot and hunt down AI researchers and ceos and gonna burn them at the stake and then eat them :D. Musk will tell the sect members to hunt down Sam and the first one who bites his calves will be awarded a cybertruck.
Oh and data centers gonna be looted after hungry pepl eat the security guards and the mercenaries. Also remember everyone have rifles and gatlings buried in the garden :DDD.
Niice future.
While the west clutches their pearls, China roars ahead on manufacturing, energy, and AI. Unqualified military supremacy will soon follow. I weep for my children.
Bunch of idiots. We’re all going to lose our jobs but you can only hold back the inevitable for so long. This idiot populous has a total inability to see past the extremely short term. What exactly is going to happen you’re going to block the data centers. You’re going to make it hard to make technical progress and then someone else will eat your lunch and now you’re just poor.
Personally I'm not convinced by pro-accelerationism arguments. Why shouldn't technical progress be hard? Why shouldn't the inevitable be held back as long as possible? What does it mean to have someone else eat our lunch in terms of AI?
It’s because you live in a world with competitors now this isn’t the 60s and the 70s anymore. There are legitimately quite a few countries that can effectively compete. Someone else eating your lunch in this case means you’re poor, have no global power and life for all of us will be worse than what we currently enjoy.