It’s coming to the surface now. But it’s a marvel in itself that it has taken as long as it has. AI is really, really unpopular with the American people — even more unpopular than I’d realized, as I noted a week ago. And yet for most of the last couple years, in elite discourse, on TV and in the big news publications, you would feel very backwards and Luddite expressing more than a general caution that rogue AI intentionally blowing up the world would be a bad thing. Because it’s the new thing and who doesn’t like the new and innovation and all the good stuff? We remain, meanwhile, in an economic moment in which vast, almost unprecedented amounts of economic resources are being directed toward AI rollout. Public messaging in advertising and product development are filled with reminders of how many awesome things AI can do for you. And yet everyone basically hates it.
As this Politico piece from a couple days ago points out, something like 80% of Americans think AI should be robustly regulated and fewer than 20% of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on America over the next 20 years. These are shocking numbers, to put it mildly. AI is running only slightly ahead of child molesters in the public imagination. And yet the signature AI policy of the Trump White House is banning states from regulating AI — a remarkable thing regardless of the fact that the president has no power to do this. These are the kinds of disconnects you only see at fluid and unstable, inflection-point moments in a country’s politics.
Of course, perhaps if AI can do all the things its boosters claim and corporate America buys in, maybe it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks? It will generate enough money to keep the politicians happy and winning elections. This vision of what we might call escape velocity is baked into almost all AI boosterism: the escape from the mundane stupidities of public accountability or public oversight. I continue to believe that while the future of AI itself seems uncertain to me, as an idea and an ambition it is the central thing around which the whole world of oligarchs and strongmen now revolves.
