why people are starting to rightfully fear a.i.

Opinions polls show that a lot of people want AI development to slow down and governments to step in. And they have really good reasons for their caution.

According to countless tech companies, artificial intelligence is here and is poised to grow exponentially so we all need to buckle up and adapt. According to the public, it’s great that AI is making progress but it shouldn’t be allowed to do so at the cost of jobs and living standards. In fact, 72% of American voters want a slowdown in AI adoption and development, worried that allowing the technology to keep its runaway pace can become disastrous without proper regulation. Before there are any more ChatGPTs or Midjourneys, people want a discussion about where AI is headed, how we can trust it, and what rules should be in place for its future.

Now, it may be tempting to dismiss these people as a new generation of Luddites who just need to get with the program, but they have very good reasons for their skeptical take on AI. You see, a world driven by this technology is not a world where people are required to come to an office from 9 am to 5 pm to manage complex spreadsheets or reports, or write passable ad copy and PR releases, or research legal precedents for a trial, or a whole multitude of other tasks which can now be handled by only a handful of human supervisors and a laptop. This has sent countless people looking for career options they hope will survive “the end of work” after the AI invasion.

Workers are understandably scared when their bosses talk about AI adoption at every all hands then ask “what about us?” only to hear said bosses reply “what about you?” In the West, people have to work to live, literally. Without a paycheck, they’ll be on the street in fairly short order so when they’re not sure if the paychecks will keep coming after AI starts rampaging through their corporate systems, they will want guarantees that they’ll at least have a chance to make a living, and that those in charge will have a plan for them that doesn’t involve diving humans into “necessary evil” and “food.”

how automation will break our economy

What most of us today know as the global economy is consumer capitalism, a flood of goods and services that we need to keep purchasing at ever-escalating volumes and rising profit margins so financial organizations don’t get upset and devalue the more or less arbitrary values of things on the stock market, tell us we’re in a global financial crisis, and demand money from governments while firing millions of us. But there is an odd conundrum at the heart of modern consumer capitalism. Companies want to sell goods and services for as much as possible while paying workers as little as possible and paying as little in tax as they can.

While tax and trade regulations weren’t an international shopping mall where you can pick and choose what rules to follow if you have a good lawyer and accountant, and at least some significant degree of human labor was required to produce said goods and services, there would always be an equilibrium. Your workers were not only a required investment, but also a primary customer base. You needed them to be able to afford to buy bigger and bigger ticket items and feel comfortable enough to splurge on fairly predictable basis. But automation has effectively broken the mechanism for achieving that equilibrium and trapped us in a bizarre and terrifying gray area.

The more workers become optional and the worse they are treated, the less they can afford and the more the current economic paradigm will resemble a pyramid scheme in which parasitic middlemen charge for facilitating access to automated goods and services on which as little thought, effort, and investment as possible was spent. The ultimate end of the consumer economy as we know it may well be the new attitude of “just shut up and consume” by the People Who Own Things, who are now actively not only destroying living standards across the world, but the things they own so a market will give them more imaginary money for cramming more crap down our throats.

why we need quality over quantity

Despite the thundering of pundits constantly telling us people are just scared of the adoption and potential of AI just don’t understand where the world is headed, polls with which we started this discussion say they actually understand very well where we’re going and want to get ahead of the problems the current approach will bring us if left unchecked. They can see that life for a typical person is getting worse and that despite the cheap nifty new gadgets thrown at us, housing, education, healthcare, and recreation are all getting far more expensive while their real pay barely budges and their working hours seem to stretch longer and longer.

People don’t want to toil at jobs they generally hate, they want their lives to have real, actual meaning and have a positive impact on those around them. They don’t want to watch micro-targeted AI generated Content Brand Content in a house forcibly turned into an investment vehicle full of Stuff Brand Stuff that you have to replace every two years because it’s made from wet garbage and glue in a factory where humans from impoverished countries run 3D printers for a pittance per 18 hour shift. And they also don’t want to work hard when it’s been made abundantly clear that all that hard work will buy someone else a third Ferrari rather than secure their retirements.

So, it’s not that the public “just doesn’t get it” and is terrified by technobabble. They get it perfectly and are rejecting the boring cyberpunk dystopia into which they have been forced by people to whom empathy is now an alien concept, and who live in the delusion that they’re destined for galaxy-spanning immortal rule. And as someone who not only works with technology daily but makes it, and has studied and created AI models and automated what used to be full time jobs, I would encourage people to stay skeptical, ask a lot of questions, and refuse to settle for the status quo. If they do, it may all end in tears, to borrow from Marvin the Paranoid Android.