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I just noticed this Politico piece which contains a poll they just conducted about AI and the odds that AI will lead to the extinction of humanity. 63% of Americans think there is at least a “moderate risk” that AI means our species is toast. 20% see a “significant risk” and an another 17% think our demise is “almost certain.” As with data centers, there’s little difference between Republicans and Democrats.
Needless to say, this is not an issue on which we want to assume that majority opinion is a good proxy for reality. But it is a potent reminder of the almost unfathomable depth of negative opinion about AI, ranging from hate to fear and basically all the other negative emotions in between. Meanwhile, this question seems pretty distinct from the even more overwhelming opposition to data centers. They’re not two expressions of the same animus but two distinct channels of opposition directed at the same thing.
I hesitate to put this all down to image or poor PR or the overweening arrogance and unconstrained power of Big Tech. And I’m not. Maybe AI is just super dangerous and bad and people are seeing that. Really, it’s not an either/or proposition. We can’t look at these numbers, levels of strongly felt opposition that are getting myriad politicians to change their positions basically overnight, and not see an industry used to doing anything it wants suddenly hitting a brick wall of public opposition. Like how badly does an industry have to screw up to find itself in this kind of situation?
One thing is that tech CEOs have leaned into the idea that AI will take everyone’s job. Not a plus. Also, they’ve suggested significant chances that you and I as well as our children and our parents and our friends will all die because of it. Not a plus either. I jest of course to the extent that one can jest about such things. But whatever the truth about the AI horizon, what it will and won’t do, all of these things are examples of taking a very weird subculture, investing it with unimaginable levels of power, and then both flexing that power and exposing that subculture to direct public scrutiny in a wealth of fear and animosity. What we’re talking about here is no different from the “move fast and break things” Facebook motto that came to typify Silicon Valley culture almost a generation ago. (Zuckerberg officially shifted the motto to the aptly dorky “Move fast with stable infrastructure” in 2014.) But that line reads very different coming from the maker of a photo and personal update sharing app versus people creating software they say might misbehave with bioweapons or electrical grids or other fun ways to exterminate us that we obsolescent humans can barely conceive of.
As many have noted, the AI story is not simply about AI but a permutation of opposition to an emerging American oligarchy, a mix of ultra wealth coupled with laws and Supreme Court edicts that put the power of extreme wealth outside almost any framework of public accountability. We discussed yesterday how backlash from Democrats and their own employees pushed the owner-CEOs of the big tech platforms hard to the right and into the arms of Trumpism. But at the moment the benefits of that alliance look more and more short-term. While big corporations historically favor the Republican Party, they generally avoid making that support too public or tying themselves so tightly to one party that they have no influence when their favored party is out of power. One of the basic political questions of the coming years will be how Silicon Valley reacts to a public backlash that increasingly melds Big Tech and Trumpism into a consolidated social and political force for much of the public.
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