I've been studying the consumer perception of AI for 3 years ( internally at Google and now externally). Whats still being brushed over, is that most consumer AI products are not seen as super useful to the average tech consumer.
This is a direct (and very predictable) outcome of the playbook the AI labs have been running for product development. They are "launching and learning" and relying on dogfooding and developer feedback. But internal employees are not representative of average users...the developers and early adopters they are asking for feedback from on X are not average users...the "ai influencers" they are inviting to their labs for 'early previews' are not average users. The AI industry has created an echo chamber, which is a great way to build products a single community loves and leaves everyone else behind.
The Gallup study you cited, also found that the majority of Gen Z don't find AI to be helpful for brainstorming, searching for information, or thinking critically...these are *core* use cases for AI, and these numbers are getting worse from last year....and I don't blame them:
1. A chatbot is not an intuitive mental model for the average person to use. People use it like Search, because what other mental model do they have? At this point Claude needs a handbook to figure out. There's just so much you need to know about AI to get meaningful use out it.
2. AI slop and misinformation are taking over peoples news/ content feeds. They associate the AI output from free models with hallucinations and as a result, AI is considered "dumb" technology.
3. Consumers are dealing with a bunch of AI features they didn't ask for, while their favorite products are getting worse over time. The tech industry itself is producing AI-slop.
The reality is the advancements of AI capability have gone to engineers and CEOs, not to the average tech consumer.
One of my first experiences with “AI” as a software engineer was trying to use Microsoft’s “adaptive cards” designer to construct a template for an integration we needed. Some of the controls I needed to get simple data wired through (e.g. what field to draw the image from) didn’t seem to be anywhere in the UI or the developer docs, so I turned to the tool they did provide for looking stuff up: a Copilot widget. Well, Copilot mangled the json so badly the editor wouldn’t load and I had to refresh the page without saving to try again. Several times, because Copilot just could not stop “hallucinating” properties that weren’t in the product it was bundled with. Eventually I just had to guess-and-check my way through figuring out the API surface.
Thank you for putting together these different pools and summarising the findings. From casual discussions, I think the underlying cause is more basic than what the pool responses make out.
The vast majority of people have lost faith in / trust in large corporations (often represented by the big 7 techbros) but broadly in the tech industry and large companies as a whole. There was a time when tech had a lot of good will as a positive disruptor to the “establishment”. The establishment was slowing positive change, monopolising and extracting, and focusing on the wrong social problems. Tech was disrupting that.
But now tech is seen as just another, even worse establishment. The truth is likely that they aren’t as bad as some of the abuses of the past. But through the lenses of today, they are monsters.
This has been made worse by the complete sacrifice of any form of corporate social responsibility by these mega companies. Even for people who disagreed with the priorities of ESG, CSR was largely supported and helped monopolistic large companies pretend that they weren’t purely profit seeking. I don’t think CEOs of these companies recognise how much damage they did to themselves and their company’s public credibility by so quickly abandoning any even superficial nod to social obligation.
No one really believes anything a company or CEO says any more. And that together with the reality that the average person has higher bills, concerns about health, and worries about the world yet the establishment solution to this cocktail of human suffering is “build more data centres and talk to more chatbots”.
“The AI backlash has no equivalent singular disaster (yet); it’s driven by diffuse anxieties about energy, water, jobs, utility bills, corporate power, and the speed of change”.
I think what you might want to consider is how the “disaster” may have already occurred in the form of social media and our lives driven by algorithms. People were already fed up with that - it’s what already eroded trust in Silicon Valley.
I really doubt it's about the data centers. The data centers are just a symptom.
The problem is who gets to accrue the rewards and who gets to suffer the risks?
Most people are correctly thinking that they are probably not the ones who get to enjoy the wealth generation that AI promises to bring. Most people are employees being told to use AI without any coherent workflow or governance, or being told to train the AI to replace them. Most people would not want to have a data center sucking up natural resources to continue funding these projects.
96% of people working in the United States do not work in tech, and yet almost all of the people in the room who are building AI and AI products come from a very small slice of the world concentrated with prestigious STEM backgrounds and living in the Bay Area.
A very small percentage of people with limited demographics are rolling out products and technology that have a huge impact on everybody else's lives. Must of us do not even have representation in the same rooms where these decisions are happening.
I don't fault people for being mad at AI. They're feeling ignored and being told that they don't matter.
They can sense that the future that is being painted doesn't seem to have them in mind, and they're probably correct.
If you listen to the talk in the Bay Area and what's on X, tech folks are afraid of becoming part of a “permanent underclass”: If AI gets so good that it is able to replace all human knowledge work, then where does that leave the working class?
I think this is a rational response to a situation fraught with both upsides and risks. It does not feel tilted in the majority’s favor.
This compilation is genuinely useful. The 71% Gallup number on datacenters has been circulating without context, and seeing it sit next to the Pew and NBC reads makes the consistency of the shift hard to dismiss.
Every week, I try to strip the hype and noise surrounding AI and provide concrete "next moves" for non-technical leaders. I see the shift Alberto has laid out here playing out at senior levels inside companies as a much quieter question.
Your VP reads these polls and says "maybe we slow down on AI for a quarter." That ask feels prudent in the moment. All of your peers nod along. This is the very moment when you can pull ahead of the rest. The moment when you say which one of your team's one AI workflows is actually moving the needle and surviving this shift in perception. This four-blank answer template will come in handy: one named tool, in one named workflow, moving one named metric, by one named date. None of those four blanks need public approval for you to keep going.
Curious whether anyone here is seeing the same pattern. Leaders citing the polls as cover to retire AI initiatives that were actually working, but have become just unfashionable. What are you doing in those moments?
Amid global uncertainty, there are cautious signs of resilience.
The International Monetary Fund has raised the United Kingdom’s 2026 growth forecast from 0.8% to 1.0% reflecting growing confidence in economic recovery despite ongoing global challenges.
This is an important signal.
It shows that disciplined policy, fiscal responsibility, and economic coordination can still deliver results even in a volatile environment.
But this optimism comes with caution.
The IMF has also emphasized:
The importance of reducing fiscal deficits responsibly
And the need for careful management of interest rates, particularly as inflation risks remain
In other words, stability is improving
but it is not yet secure.
The broader lesson is clear:
Even as parts of the global economy show resilience,
the environment remains fragile.
Progress must be protected, not assumed.
This is a moment for balanced leadership:
Supporting growth
Controlling inflation
And maintaining long-term fiscal discipline
Because in today’s interconnected world,
confidence is one of the most valuable economic assets we have.
And it must be earned and sustained through sound policy and global cooperation.
The Loudoun County number is the most useful piece in this compilation. 51 percent believing datacenters worsen their tax bills in a county where datacenter revenue actually suppresses property tax and funds the school district means the perception channel has fully detached from the fiscal channel. The Wisconsin partisan asymmetry compounds it: Republicans moved 53 to 55 percent, Independents 55 to 76, Democrats 56 to 85. The bipartisan label undersells what is really an Independent and Democrat collapse onto a position Republicans already held.
The utility and urgency of AI, is military. It must be developed in order to increase the efficiency of killing people.
With China deploying AI and robotics to kill its enemies, we, China's enemy and target of conquest, must follow suit.
It's really that simple, and that urgent.
In civilian applications, it's destructive. Digital life is severely damaging the fabric of society in ways entirely predictable and already predicted.
There is little choice but to develop and adopt AI, but it should be restricted to military use.
The numbers in the surveys are unsurprising; those whose prosperity will increase because of AI are enthusiastic about it. Those who remember the unfiltered utterances of the tech bros three decades ago, have not forgotten; "there will be nothing that the meat bags have that we will need, they will be discarded as useless eaters."
Perhaps the inadvisability of bruiting about inuslting terms like "meat space" may have something to do with the degree to which arrogant techies are increasingly despised by the general public.
"Oh, just get a blue collar job" is the new "everyone with a university degree will have remunerative employment." By all means, lets help unemployed coal miners in Appalachia "learn to code."
people are beginning to catch on, though, and the deceit is wearing thin. Perhaps watching factory-built modular housing units erected, may have something to do with it. They're nothing that mediocre robots can't manufacture.
AI development is a cruel necessity, a requirement in a "kill or be killed" world. That paradigm can certainly change, though; the Thalerist behavioral scientists are making great strides in "nudging" an incurious, alienated and disengaged polity into acceptance of a totalitarian unification "all watched over by machines of loving grace."
It isn't "Ludditism," regardless of anyone's arrogant, sneering, breezy dismissiveness. The buggy whip factory workers went into related new (and old) industries, none of which were attempting to replace human beings altogether in the extraction, conversion and distribution of commodities essential to basic sustenance of human life.
After all, even wagoneers adapted to driving trucks and taxis.
It didn't require the San Francisco juxtaposition of an autonomous taxi beneath a "stop hiring humans" billboard, for people to understand why the Canadian assisted suicide program's expansion to include eligibility for those suffering from clinical depression resulting from economic hardship, was "coming to a theatre near you."
As ever, I shall refuse to participate in any of the looting, arson and murder of which the Floyd drug overdose death riots were only a mild taste of what is to come. AI deployment in civilian hands will bring that to every doorstep not encircled by automated AI-directed robotic killing machines.
A hard rain is falling; it is concentrating itself into what will soon be a typhoon.
"It happened faster than the backlash against nuclear power, than the backlash against wind farms, or any comparable infrastructure opposition in the modern polling era."
And both of those backlashes were blown out of proportion by propaganda paid by big oil. Yes. The balcklash WASNT caused by Big Oil but they fuelled its growth to ridiculous and comedic extent.
While Musk and TechBro's behavior could be called the origin point for this particular backlash....the SIZE, SCOPE and especially SPEED with how it materialized points to one single inescapable conclusion:
While it was absolutelly due to TechBro Asshollery...the explosion of the topic was utterly artificial.
So ask yourself this: who would benefit from chaos in the US? I do not think that whoever did this wanted to merely somehow slow down US AI deployment but use a wedge issue and then inflate it to catastrophic levels for the entire country.
And there is only one country on the panet right now that is constantly dunking on the US in both Domestic and Foreign social-engineering departments. Making the US look like amateurs in comparison.
Really nice post! I've been study AI HW through first principles and the technology itself is interesting, but I never really thought about the public perception until now.
It seems like the emergence of AI is exactly the same pattern you see when the discovery of fossil fuels and machinery greatly enhanced human productivity. You have the robber barons owning the means of production and exploiting people in general with low wages, child labor, etc, where the government eventually steps in and regulates.
Nowadays, AI is really just amplifying the already existing tendencies of greed and short term thinking amongst CEOs who view it as an efficiency enhancer and resort to narrow tactics to enhance it (layoffs) without understanding the broad social impact.
To me, its worth learning the patterns throughout history like this where humanity acquires a productivity enhancing tool and the impact its had, because mistakes seem to repeat themselves by people who don't understand them.
LLMs are not a productivity enhancing tool! We almost missed a deadline at work because one of my co-workers tried to get an LLM to fabricate a solution to a problem he had. We're still working overtime to recover the lost time!
And it was obvious he'd been high on LLM use. He started talking to me as if he was prompting an LLM, step by step to try to get me to solve his problem.
I wanted him to solve it himself so I was having to explain "this is how you use a debugger" to someone who'd been using them for decades. The deskilling was terrifying.
You confuse "volume" for quality, calling an increase in a simulacrum of work an increase in work itself.
These things only work because their RNG use fools people into thinking they are thinking, and if you remove that they don't fool people and they can't even randomly get lucky after being promoted multiple times internally until what they fabricate functions ala Claude Code.
I hearted the Alberto Romero post on how the U.S. turned against AI. That's praise for his work, not for what his work reveals. The about-face among Americans is distressing, to say the least. AI is revolutionary and therefore disruptive. I understood that. But to see such an overwhelming response to the reality that of AI is shocking, even if it was expected.
NIMBY fear of data centers is now firmly established. We can expect the pace of development to slow considerably. Psychological fear of job competition is even more established. Romero compares it to the fear of nuclear power generation and finds that AI is more threatening than Three Mile Island ever was. That fear isn't going to go away. The so-called Frontier companies are going to be vilified, and their leaders should probably tighten their personal security practices, lest the fate that befell the United Healthcare exec befalls them. It will be interesting to see what happens to the IPO tech stock offerings on the horizon.
Reading about the Luddite movement 225 years ago doesn't offer any hope for the immediate future. There was considerable unrest for several years as weavers who worked in the pleasant surroundings of their own homes in what are called "cottage industries." The weavers burned thousands of power looms and intimidated, beat, or killed the owners of fabric mills that produced cloth far more cheaply and quickly than the hand weavers. The most violent offenders against progress were eventually hanged, but for a time, change stood still in England. Eventually, civic order was restored, and the Luddites gave up. But the spirit of the movement and the emotional belief that bells could be unrung gave rise to a broader hatred of the factory system and industrialization. We are still fighting those battles today.
I am reminded of a Christopher Nolan movie now out of date. Interstellar was the dramatic creation of a world in which exploration of space had to be conducted in secret because society found itself caught up in an hysterical environmental reaction that made the future of the human race seem like it was on a dead-end street.
It's time for some soul-searching by the tech bros and serious discussions among all citizens about what is and isn't artificial about this new technology. As usual, I find myself holding the short end of the stick, but that's okay. I owe it to my conscience to stand for revolutionary change because universal stasis will lead to much worse outcomes. America seems to have a corner on this reactionary impulse. The rest of the world seems to be taking to AI with great glee. That includes our worst enemies. So perhaps we are only reaping the whirlwind of our own success. That's too bad, but it's not the first time the majority has been wrong.
I've been studying the consumer perception of AI for 3 years ( internally at Google and now externally). Whats still being brushed over, is that most consumer AI products are not seen as super useful to the average tech consumer.
This is a direct (and very predictable) outcome of the playbook the AI labs have been running for product development. They are "launching and learning" and relying on dogfooding and developer feedback. But internal employees are not representative of average users...the developers and early adopters they are asking for feedback from on X are not average users...the "ai influencers" they are inviting to their labs for 'early previews' are not average users. The AI industry has created an echo chamber, which is a great way to build products a single community loves and leaves everyone else behind.
The Gallup study you cited, also found that the majority of Gen Z don't find AI to be helpful for brainstorming, searching for information, or thinking critically...these are *core* use cases for AI, and these numbers are getting worse from last year....and I don't blame them:
1. A chatbot is not an intuitive mental model for the average person to use. People use it like Search, because what other mental model do they have? At this point Claude needs a handbook to figure out. There's just so much you need to know about AI to get meaningful use out it.
2. AI slop and misinformation are taking over peoples news/ content feeds. They associate the AI output from free models with hallucinations and as a result, AI is considered "dumb" technology.
3. Consumers are dealing with a bunch of AI features they didn't ask for, while their favorite products are getting worse over time. The tech industry itself is producing AI-slop.
The reality is the advancements of AI capability have gone to engineers and CEOs, not to the average tech consumer.
100% agreed
One of my first experiences with “AI” as a software engineer was trying to use Microsoft’s “adaptive cards” designer to construct a template for an integration we needed. Some of the controls I needed to get simple data wired through (e.g. what field to draw the image from) didn’t seem to be anywhere in the UI or the developer docs, so I turned to the tool they did provide for looking stuff up: a Copilot widget. Well, Copilot mangled the json so badly the editor wouldn’t load and I had to refresh the page without saving to try again. Several times, because Copilot just could not stop “hallucinating” properties that weren’t in the product it was bundled with. Eventually I just had to guess-and-check my way through figuring out the API surface.
Thank you for putting together these different pools and summarising the findings. From casual discussions, I think the underlying cause is more basic than what the pool responses make out.
The vast majority of people have lost faith in / trust in large corporations (often represented by the big 7 techbros) but broadly in the tech industry and large companies as a whole. There was a time when tech had a lot of good will as a positive disruptor to the “establishment”. The establishment was slowing positive change, monopolising and extracting, and focusing on the wrong social problems. Tech was disrupting that.
But now tech is seen as just another, even worse establishment. The truth is likely that they aren’t as bad as some of the abuses of the past. But through the lenses of today, they are monsters.
This has been made worse by the complete sacrifice of any form of corporate social responsibility by these mega companies. Even for people who disagreed with the priorities of ESG, CSR was largely supported and helped monopolistic large companies pretend that they weren’t purely profit seeking. I don’t think CEOs of these companies recognise how much damage they did to themselves and their company’s public credibility by so quickly abandoning any even superficial nod to social obligation.
No one really believes anything a company or CEO says any more. And that together with the reality that the average person has higher bills, concerns about health, and worries about the world yet the establishment solution to this cocktail of human suffering is “build more data centres and talk to more chatbots”.
Aren’t there better things we can burn money on?
“The AI backlash has no equivalent singular disaster (yet); it’s driven by diffuse anxieties about energy, water, jobs, utility bills, corporate power, and the speed of change”.
I think what you might want to consider is how the “disaster” may have already occurred in the form of social media and our lives driven by algorithms. People were already fed up with that - it’s what already eroded trust in Silicon Valley.
I really doubt it's about the data centers. The data centers are just a symptom.
The problem is who gets to accrue the rewards and who gets to suffer the risks?
Most people are correctly thinking that they are probably not the ones who get to enjoy the wealth generation that AI promises to bring. Most people are employees being told to use AI without any coherent workflow or governance, or being told to train the AI to replace them. Most people would not want to have a data center sucking up natural resources to continue funding these projects.
96% of people working in the United States do not work in tech, and yet almost all of the people in the room who are building AI and AI products come from a very small slice of the world concentrated with prestigious STEM backgrounds and living in the Bay Area.
A very small percentage of people with limited demographics are rolling out products and technology that have a huge impact on everybody else's lives. Must of us do not even have representation in the same rooms where these decisions are happening.
I don't fault people for being mad at AI. They're feeling ignored and being told that they don't matter.
They can sense that the future that is being painted doesn't seem to have them in mind, and they're probably correct.
If you listen to the talk in the Bay Area and what's on X, tech folks are afraid of becoming part of a “permanent underclass”: If AI gets so good that it is able to replace all human knowledge work, then where does that leave the working class?
I think this is a rational response to a situation fraught with both upsides and risks. It does not feel tilted in the majority’s favor.
This compilation is genuinely useful. The 71% Gallup number on datacenters has been circulating without context, and seeing it sit next to the Pew and NBC reads makes the consistency of the shift hard to dismiss.
Every week, I try to strip the hype and noise surrounding AI and provide concrete "next moves" for non-technical leaders. I see the shift Alberto has laid out here playing out at senior levels inside companies as a much quieter question.
Your VP reads these polls and says "maybe we slow down on AI for a quarter." That ask feels prudent in the moment. All of your peers nod along. This is the very moment when you can pull ahead of the rest. The moment when you say which one of your team's one AI workflows is actually moving the needle and surviving this shift in perception. This four-blank answer template will come in handy: one named tool, in one named workflow, moving one named metric, by one named date. None of those four blanks need public approval for you to keep going.
Curious whether anyone here is seeing the same pattern. Leaders citing the polls as cover to retire AI initiatives that were actually working, but have become just unfashionable. What are you doing in those moments?
Excellencies,
Amid global uncertainty, there are cautious signs of resilience.
The International Monetary Fund has raised the United Kingdom’s 2026 growth forecast from 0.8% to 1.0% reflecting growing confidence in economic recovery despite ongoing global challenges.
This is an important signal.
It shows that disciplined policy, fiscal responsibility, and economic coordination can still deliver results even in a volatile environment.
But this optimism comes with caution.
The IMF has also emphasized:
The importance of reducing fiscal deficits responsibly
And the need for careful management of interest rates, particularly as inflation risks remain
In other words, stability is improving
but it is not yet secure.
The broader lesson is clear:
Even as parts of the global economy show resilience,
the environment remains fragile.
Progress must be protected, not assumed.
This is a moment for balanced leadership:
Supporting growth
Controlling inflation
And maintaining long-term fiscal discipline
Because in today’s interconnected world,
confidence is one of the most valuable economic assets we have.
And it must be earned and sustained through sound policy and global cooperation.
Thank you.
The Loudoun County number is the most useful piece in this compilation. 51 percent believing datacenters worsen their tax bills in a county where datacenter revenue actually suppresses property tax and funds the school district means the perception channel has fully detached from the fiscal channel. The Wisconsin partisan asymmetry compounds it: Republicans moved 53 to 55 percent, Independents 55 to 76, Democrats 56 to 85. The bipartisan label undersells what is really an Independent and Democrat collapse onto a position Republicans already held.
The utility and urgency of AI, is military. It must be developed in order to increase the efficiency of killing people.
With China deploying AI and robotics to kill its enemies, we, China's enemy and target of conquest, must follow suit.
It's really that simple, and that urgent.
In civilian applications, it's destructive. Digital life is severely damaging the fabric of society in ways entirely predictable and already predicted.
There is little choice but to develop and adopt AI, but it should be restricted to military use.
The numbers in the surveys are unsurprising; those whose prosperity will increase because of AI are enthusiastic about it. Those who remember the unfiltered utterances of the tech bros three decades ago, have not forgotten; "there will be nothing that the meat bags have that we will need, they will be discarded as useless eaters."
Perhaps the inadvisability of bruiting about inuslting terms like "meat space" may have something to do with the degree to which arrogant techies are increasingly despised by the general public.
"Oh, just get a blue collar job" is the new "everyone with a university degree will have remunerative employment." By all means, lets help unemployed coal miners in Appalachia "learn to code."
people are beginning to catch on, though, and the deceit is wearing thin. Perhaps watching factory-built modular housing units erected, may have something to do with it. They're nothing that mediocre robots can't manufacture.
AI development is a cruel necessity, a requirement in a "kill or be killed" world. That paradigm can certainly change, though; the Thalerist behavioral scientists are making great strides in "nudging" an incurious, alienated and disengaged polity into acceptance of a totalitarian unification "all watched over by machines of loving grace."
It isn't "Ludditism," regardless of anyone's arrogant, sneering, breezy dismissiveness. The buggy whip factory workers went into related new (and old) industries, none of which were attempting to replace human beings altogether in the extraction, conversion and distribution of commodities essential to basic sustenance of human life.
After all, even wagoneers adapted to driving trucks and taxis.
It didn't require the San Francisco juxtaposition of an autonomous taxi beneath a "stop hiring humans" billboard, for people to understand why the Canadian assisted suicide program's expansion to include eligibility for those suffering from clinical depression resulting from economic hardship, was "coming to a theatre near you."
As ever, I shall refuse to participate in any of the looting, arson and murder of which the Floyd drug overdose death riots were only a mild taste of what is to come. AI deployment in civilian hands will bring that to every doorstep not encircled by automated AI-directed robotic killing machines.
A hard rain is falling; it is concentrating itself into what will soon be a typhoon.
"It happened faster than the backlash against nuclear power, than the backlash against wind farms, or any comparable infrastructure opposition in the modern polling era."
And both of those backlashes were blown out of proportion by propaganda paid by big oil. Yes. The balcklash WASNT caused by Big Oil but they fuelled its growth to ridiculous and comedic extent.
While Musk and TechBro's behavior could be called the origin point for this particular backlash....the SIZE, SCOPE and especially SPEED with how it materialized points to one single inescapable conclusion:
While it was absolutelly due to TechBro Asshollery...the explosion of the topic was utterly artificial.
So ask yourself this: who would benefit from chaos in the US? I do not think that whoever did this wanted to merely somehow slow down US AI deployment but use a wedge issue and then inflate it to catastrophic levels for the entire country.
And there is only one country on the panet right now that is constantly dunking on the US in both Domestic and Foreign social-engineering departments. Making the US look like amateurs in comparison.
Really nice post! I've been study AI HW through first principles and the technology itself is interesting, but I never really thought about the public perception until now.
It seems like the emergence of AI is exactly the same pattern you see when the discovery of fossil fuels and machinery greatly enhanced human productivity. You have the robber barons owning the means of production and exploiting people in general with low wages, child labor, etc, where the government eventually steps in and regulates.
Nowadays, AI is really just amplifying the already existing tendencies of greed and short term thinking amongst CEOs who view it as an efficiency enhancer and resort to narrow tactics to enhance it (layoffs) without understanding the broad social impact.
To me, its worth learning the patterns throughout history like this where humanity acquires a productivity enhancing tool and the impact its had, because mistakes seem to repeat themselves by people who don't understand them.
LLMs are not a productivity enhancing tool! We almost missed a deadline at work because one of my co-workers tried to get an LLM to fabricate a solution to a problem he had. We're still working overtime to recover the lost time!
And it was obvious he'd been high on LLM use. He started talking to me as if he was prompting an LLM, step by step to try to get me to solve his problem.
I wanted him to solve it himself so I was having to explain "this is how you use a debugger" to someone who'd been using them for decades. The deskilling was terrifying.
You confuse "volume" for quality, calling an increase in a simulacrum of work an increase in work itself.
These things only work because their RNG use fools people into thinking they are thinking, and if you remove that they don't fool people and they can't even randomly get lucky after being promoted multiple times internally until what they fabricate functions ala Claude Code.
I hearted the Alberto Romero post on how the U.S. turned against AI. That's praise for his work, not for what his work reveals. The about-face among Americans is distressing, to say the least. AI is revolutionary and therefore disruptive. I understood that. But to see such an overwhelming response to the reality that of AI is shocking, even if it was expected.
NIMBY fear of data centers is now firmly established. We can expect the pace of development to slow considerably. Psychological fear of job competition is even more established. Romero compares it to the fear of nuclear power generation and finds that AI is more threatening than Three Mile Island ever was. That fear isn't going to go away. The so-called Frontier companies are going to be vilified, and their leaders should probably tighten their personal security practices, lest the fate that befell the United Healthcare exec befalls them. It will be interesting to see what happens to the IPO tech stock offerings on the horizon.
Reading about the Luddite movement 225 years ago doesn't offer any hope for the immediate future. There was considerable unrest for several years as weavers who worked in the pleasant surroundings of their own homes in what are called "cottage industries." The weavers burned thousands of power looms and intimidated, beat, or killed the owners of fabric mills that produced cloth far more cheaply and quickly than the hand weavers. The most violent offenders against progress were eventually hanged, but for a time, change stood still in England. Eventually, civic order was restored, and the Luddites gave up. But the spirit of the movement and the emotional belief that bells could be unrung gave rise to a broader hatred of the factory system and industrialization. We are still fighting those battles today.
I am reminded of a Christopher Nolan movie now out of date. Interstellar was the dramatic creation of a world in which exploration of space had to be conducted in secret because society found itself caught up in an hysterical environmental reaction that made the future of the human race seem like it was on a dead-end street.
It's time for some soul-searching by the tech bros and serious discussions among all citizens about what is and isn't artificial about this new technology. As usual, I find myself holding the short end of the stick, but that's okay. I owe it to my conscience to stand for revolutionary change because universal stasis will lead to much worse outcomes. America seems to have a corner on this reactionary impulse. The rest of the world seems to be taking to AI with great glee. That includes our worst enemies. So perhaps we are only reaping the whirlwind of our own success. That's too bad, but it's not the first time the majority has been wrong.
From the essay:
"Americans have soured on AI datacenters, on AI itself, and on the people building it."
Datacenters are intrusive.
AI is Average Intelligence (except no Intelligence); How about Average Insipidity?
The people building it are goof balls.