Despite a massive campaign by some of the wealthiest companies in the world to push AI as the cure-all for society’s problems, regular working-class people remain resentful of the technology at best, and downright petrified at worst.
At a contentious county commission meeting in Box Elder, Utah, for example, sheriff’s deputies held irate community members back after three county commissioners rammed through a hyperscale data center backed by Canadian billionaire Kevin O’Leary. A growing number of younger workers, fearing life in a market economy in which their labor is made obsolete, are actively sabotaging AI in the workplace. A not insignificant number of concerned citizens have started ripping AI surveillance cameras out of their mountings.
Tech executives and AI experts, meanwhile, are stoked about the new technology. Corporate consultants no longer bite their tongues when they talk about devastating workplace austerity regimes, while tech executives like OpenAI’s Sam Altman brag that AI is upending the basic foundations of liberal democracy.
On the outside, it may seem obvious that the people building AI and the people simply living with it would see it from different angles. What’s less obvious, however, is the sheer scale of the disconnect. As a new report by Stanford University’s AI center argues, this perception gulf between everyday people worried about the future and giddy industry insiders is massive.
According to the study, nearly two-thirds of US adults expect AI to reduce the number of available jobs over the next two decades, while a huge number report concerns about AI’s effects on society’s cognitive abilities.
Academic researchers, tech industry insiders, and analysts, meanwhile, “report more optimism than the US public,” the report found. For example, a whopping 84 percent of “AI experts” surveyed expect positive impacts on medical care, compared to just 44 percent of regular US adults. For the economic impacts, 69 percent of experts expressed optimism, compared to just 21 percent of normal folks. (Intriguingly, there are a few things that the public and the AI insiders are collectively cynical about, like news media, personal relationships, and elections.)
While the Stanford study doesn’t try to explain the rift, there is a plausible explanation: the success of AI necessarily hinges on the creation of a permanent underclass, a massive social shift which tech insiders are all too aware of — indeed, some even publicly boast about it. And make no mistake, the tech bros understand the math: a bunch of unemployed peons with nothing means a tiny handful of people will get everything.
Whether we actually end up in this hellscape is hard to say. Currently, there’s little evidence that AI is actually capable of disenfranchising the world’s workers en masse — if there was, tech billionaires would certainly have thrown the switch by now.
Still, be very suspicious of anyone telling you the real battle lines are elsewhere. More than likely, they’ve got an AI startup they’re trying to sell you on.
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