> % of U.S. adults who say they think the impact of AI on __ over the next 20 years will be positive or negative

Blank | Negative | Positive | Equal | Not sure

Society | 40 | 16 | 31 | 13

Them, personally | 31 | 23 | 27 | 19

---

Probably as much a commentary on the fallacy that bad things won't happen to us, personally, as much as a commentary on AI. But I found the difference interesting.

> the results were better

They were worse.

I think people don't like it being shoved in their faces and crammed down every hole. No one needs a Copilot key on their keyboard, or an AI summary in prime screen real estate of a Google search. These things are useful, but they're not that useful. They're not so useful that they should suffuse through every part of every piece of software.

That's a false dichotomy; I prefer kayaking over work, but I still have to work.

We've all seen stories about performance evaluations that include "how much AI are you using?" We've all seen Microsoft shove it into the OS and even the physical keyboard. We've all had the little suggestions pop up in Gmail.

Do they? And if so, by choice?

I don’t like “AI”, and I don’t use it. I read lots of stories where people are forced to use it at work but don’t use it otherwise. Do you know of people who don’t think “AI” will have a positive impact on society but still choose to use it?

>The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal.

What even is the optimistic outcome if they are right? What are we all working towards? Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness? Because I legitimately can't see a realistic outcome that actually benefits society as a whole. It all ends with very few obscenely rich people getting even more obscenely rich. But I guess we could tell an AI to put ourselves in the new Marvel movie to pass the time since we no longer have any jobs.

This... this... this! This resonates soooo deeply with me.

The wild thing is that these tech "systems" (aka companies) are made up of ostensibly good people. It's often impossible to look at individual people and say, "they're the cause of this damage." I believe that some form of evil (this word feel inadequate) emerges amidst these large systems that is incredibly hard to pinpoint. It's why dissension is so fucking critical. Tech companies continue to profit from the status quo and we need courageous people who disrupt that.

It's beyond tech. Optimism in general is out of fashion, and pessimism is pervasive. The technology for delivering bad news and highly-engaging outrage-bait has developed much faster than our society has been able to adapt to it.

Just as americans don't trust AI or the tech industry, they don't trust any public institutions.

The fundamental problem is not AI or tech or institutions being bad. The fundamental problem is that the way we distribute information about the world has a deep negativity bias. This exists because the information economy is supported by advertisement, which requires attention to profit, and attention is easiest to attract with negativity. "If it bleeds, it leads" has been true forever.

> ... tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives. Perhaps edged out only by things such as actual violent crime

Not so fast. Violent crime has been declining for about 30 years. Tech has been ascendant in that time.

> I certainly know that my life was transformed for the worst by social media. And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes

This aspect isn't talked about enough. We discuss plenty the direct impact of social media on its users, but little about how it effects even those who don't use social media at all, by proxy. Little is said how it's impossible to escape being profiled and having shadow profiles on these products just by virtue of everyone else in your life around you using them.

That's a huge problem. There is no possible way to opt out, at all.

> tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives

This. Many of us are cogs in these machines doing the harm...to ourselves and others around us.

The thing is, these companies can't exist without employees. But employees need the companies for money to pay the other companies.

> There is no successful social media company that actually cares about the negative impacts it has had on society. They speak about things such as "providing value" where value = time spent on the platform. They do not care if they ruin lives.

I will never forget Ruchi Sanghvi’s remarks at the Female Founders Conference talk in 2015[0]:

> It [the News Feed] became this virtuous cycle that we all dream of: consumption and production that just kept on giving. […] Even though everyone said they hated it, engagement had doubled.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01FjJyBAOUE#t=6m29s

I think the main reason for this outrage is partly a confluence of factors some of which you pointed it.

But my money/theory is on what I call `alonliness` specifically due to lack of labor mobility: There is no good rapid transport connecting american interior towns to big cities and people don't want to move due to a variety of factors(real estate debt, cultural affinity to area). To be clear these people are alone but not necessary lonely(there is that going on too in other segments of the population). And once you don't understand or never had the opportunity to understand something(or rather only experience its bad side effects), you distrust it at best and fear and hate it at the worst.

If you ask people 1:1 IRL who live in communities where the main source of employment is not whatever Silicon valley businesses are. They will ask you questions or make comments like " 'those' jobs are not real American jobs!" or "Aren't you afraid of getting thrown on subway tracks in NYC?". These are actual questions i got from people there.

These give an indication of the disjointedness of the sets in the venn-diagram of of the socio-economic equality and what creates such psyche. I am not sure why some think its a PR/Comms problem for big tech.

> And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes -- rather common culture was hollowed out, friends were distracted, friends fell down their own extremist rabbit holes.

Yeah... It's actually not so hard for me to just not take part in social media. The big struggle is that what I'd like to leave more than anything is a world born of its influence. The small percentage of people who are willing to go outward to places beyond the bounds of ten or so websites/apps of the Internet are still vastly influenced by them even when they reach outside. And despite that it would only take a handful of people "defecting" to form a nice tightly knit community, it's hard to find that many people with a common thread tying them together that aren't afflicted with behavior influenced by social media.

I don't want to just have places on the Internet that are actually "secretly" kind of like offshoots of Twitter/Reddit/Discord communities. That's almost not better and yet it's what a lot of attempts at "hey we're doing forums again" tends to feel like.

This comment resonated with me in a way that few pieces of writing do. My only complaint is that it’s perhaps too short. I get the impression that you could turn this comment into longer post (with citations) and I encourage you to do so.

> The loneliness epidemic, a constant drip-feed of outrage -- all so that people can make a small amount of money

I think that should read "all so that a very small number of people can make a very large amount of money"

> a constant drip-feed of outrage

I say this as someone highly critical of social media. I'm not sure you can entirely blame Social Media for this. The fact is, outrageous things are happening constantly throughout the world. We just didn't hear about most of it before Internet connectivity and the reach of social media. It's not like social media suddenly created outrage. It's just informing people about the existing absolutely outrageous things happening. Are the algorithms tuned for outrage? Sure. But that doesn't mean these outrageous things are not happening.

Back in the 1960s there was widespread outrage over the Vietnam war, but no social media drip to blame it on. The difference was: The outrageous acts were getting press and constant attention, through non social media channels.

You can either be 1. ignorant / not paying attention to the state of the world, 2. paying attention but deliberately ignoring the state of the world, or 3. outraged all the time.

I'm not saying it is good to be outraged, but that's our world. The state of the world is absolutely outrageous, and a normal human being should be feeling outrage at what is constantly being done.

I think social media is almost an oxymoron, as a medium is something "in the middle" and social contacts should be direct and not mediated (IMHO).

> The wild tech optimism of the 1990s and 2000s

Anecdotally, my optimist and disappointment has a lot less to do with flaws in the technology, versus outcomes that rested on the social / political / power-dynamic side of things.

For example, instead of everyone being able to command the digital factory of capital-equipment on their desk (or in their palm) to pursue their personal interests and welfare, the devices feel like tools of someone else who considers you a resource to be exploited, and they can command people to beat you up if you use "your" property "wrong".

To cast things out in a future-direction, imagine being excited about the dawn of practical spaceships, and the disappoint when--somehow--there are no limits on launch pollution, monopolies abound, and the average migrant to cleaner worlds must enter into multi-generational indentured servitude.

At the moment, the main visible effect is disruption in the job market.

Everyone knows it's just another stake in the coffin.

Life is like a supermarket. You are supposed to seek out the good things. You can't stop and stand and rage in the first aisle, which is filled with ultra processed food for the masses. You have to seek out the good ingredients in the back and make an effort.

You can't get stuck in life being disappointed in average people. You have to seek out good people. And good places and good things.

Or stay in the cranky cynic rabbit hole. God knows there are unlimited amounts of other cranky people to back you up. Maybe even the majority?

I wish we could unplug AI especially when you watch videos of tech folks saying it could destroy us. Umm well then.

Yet i guess it's here to stay and AI needs us, our human content to stay relevant and thrive. Personally, I think it should pay all of us (set up some system or systems) for every piece of content we create daily & choose to publish. THat way we all thrive for keeping it relevant and it thrives alongside us. Wrote about one idea / a system that would get us paid for the daily content we produce via living each day https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...

But, again I'd be happy if all of society and cultures unplugged it!

People just forget the before times. No one wants to go back to printing out driving directions or emailing photos. We take all these things for granted now but I am 100 certain the technology we have now has saved hundreds of millions of lives through downstream butterfly effects.

This is an interesting way of thinking about it. I generally agree. I especially agree that anti-AI sentiment partially comes from miss-using it. However:

Determinism isn't a requirement for 100% correctness.

A Las Vegas algorithm is randomized, non-deterministic and guarantees 100% correctness [0].

The execution can be different every time but the result will always be correct. determinism does not lose accuracy. It does lose time predictability.

So if your problem with AI is accuracy, then in theory your problem is just premature stopping.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_algorithm

Heavily agree.

The computer should be a force for order, because being a living creature is chaos.

That said LLMs can be used in ways that promote order. People just got excited and wanted to believe they could be trusted in chaos mode.

For reference chaos mode would be prompting something like: "Look at my journal entries and tell me what I should do to fix my life". Versus using one to build a table of common themes and analyzing the resulting spreadsheet yourself.

I'm not sure I fully agree with this. We can use the computer to build a deterministic system.

People aren't fully deterministic either.

Precisely! I don't think this is the whole problem but it's a part of it I keep coming back to. We took the one thing that computers were good at (getting the same answer every time, quickly and efficiently) and tossed it out the window.

Good AI system design can help somewhat, but even if you give the LLM a calculator tool, it's not guaranteed to use it every time, or to write the tool use correctly, or to copy out the answer correctly.

> there are plenty of places where machine learning algorithms make sense, but customer service is not one of them.

I don't care about human vs AI, I just want my issue resolved. Whatever does that the best and fastest. Or even better, for there to not be an issue in the first place.

> there are plenty of places where machine learning algorithms make sense, but customer service is not one of them.

You're optimising for quality, where as companies optimise for some balance of quality and cost.

AI might not be quite as good as a skilled human, but it's often good enough and a lot cheaper, so companies use it.

I actually think customer service is one of the few places it makes sense to use AI – at least to some degree. AI can provide immediate support to customer queries, and can usually handle the majority of basic issues customers have. You might need to escalate to a human in edge cases, but that's how you balance quality and cost.

working with a non deterministic tool requires taste and judgement. if you want full determinism AI is not for you but it has a market for other people?

Reality is non-deterministic (not actually, but in practice). We do strange things to balance this out all the time. Thinking that computer software must be exempt from that mess as a goal is just strange, and concerns itself too much with the ideal of a tool and not enough with the more important question: What if our lives get much, much better? Roughly everyone wants more out of life including the top one percent (and I don't mean the top 0.0001%, just your ordinary industrial nation doctors). How could we possibly morally justify denying everyone the best shot to get at least to that level, and I mean living people RIGHT NOW, ASAP not in a few hundred years? Who would be okay to say "yeah but you know, artists, copyright" and deny those who benefit most from this the opportunity?

How could we not take this shot? I understand perfectly well that a lot of things will need reconfiguration and that it's going to be painful, but dear lord, let's focus on making it go well instead of ending it.

Very true. I work for an AI company, I use it every day, it's a huge value add for certain problems.

My heat pump died the other day and I called an HVAC place and got an AI agent, which was frustrating and not helpful. So I called a different HVAC place and spoke to someone who could actually help, then I gave them lots of money.

> Who hasn't been annoyed with "AI customer service", who hasn't been annoyed with "customer service", period

I had an AI agent lie to me

I called siriusxm to get them to turn off their stupid advertising on my in-car infotainment

I had called like 3 months ago to do the same thing. The human agent confirmed she turned it off on my account

I called again recently and asked the AI to turn off in-car ads and weather alerts. The ai INSISTED this was my car's manufacturer responsibility.

I kept yelling and swearing until it finally transferred me to a human. The human confirmed that it was a part of sirius AND that the feature was disabled (it turns out that disabled features on inactive accounts automatically become re-active on 'free weekends'. Holy fuck that seems illegal. the only way to disable features during free weekends is to have an active account (aka paying them)).

My next car is going to be seriously driven by a lack of connectivity, lack of sirirusxm. I'll buy a car where someone already figured out how to physically remove the radio

It's not envisioned. There have been mass layoffs and a lot has been pinned on AI, even if it's true or not.

I don't like AI customer service either, but having seen the other side it cuts down huge amounts of inbound queries (where the answer can usually be found in knowledge bases) and provides an answer faster than a human would. As long as the escalation path to talk to a human isn't too arduous it's not too bad.

I hate the AI customer service, from drive thru to call center AI complete with fake background sounds, I hate it all. As a customer I find it insulting.

I'm thinking it has more to do with the fascism of the oligarchs at this point. These are just thinwrappers over the failure of American democracy.

Exactly, there is no full opt-out in any product people use daily.

Yes, "use this or be fired" tends to have an impact. A friend once made a analogy to opium: Sure, it's supposed to be addictive, but if you say no anyways, we're going to show up with gunboats.

Part of it is the ridiculous fear-based marketing campaign spearheaded by Anthropic et al. about how AI will automate all jobs and you'll be left behind. Works for enterprise/CEOs, predictably makes regular people hate the mere mention of AI, Asian countries don't have this nearly to the same extent.

Asian countries have governments that are at least seemingly vested in the interests of their populace. They have significant political and economic safety nets in place that can assure their populations that the government is at least somewhat aligned with the populace.

Instead for many western countries, chiefly The USA, You have a society that very blatantly is restructuring itself to service capital holders and not the population. These Governments are not aligned with their people, and are instead trying to solidify Stratified Economies where the entire engine of the country moves in service of its rich.

If the promise of AI is to provide intellectual labor in exchange for capital, the population loses its only remaining middle class made up of knowledge-workers which still hold a semblance of political power. If the middle collapses like this, the only means of social mobility will become high-risk gambles or crime.

probably because none of these polls can be trusted or accurate representation

I guess I'd say the latter, although I think that fact does not quite have the valence that Western critics might assume. Vietnam, one of the most AI-positive countries in this poll, is explicitly planning (https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/commun...) to use AI to suppress dissent and achieve permanent authoritarian control of the Vietnamese information ecosystem. I think they might be right that it'll work!

I think the tech industry is overestimating its value. Because it can code they think it can do anything else, but unlike code a lot of other work can't have a bunch of little bugs and mistakes because you can't open up real life and edit it after the fact. Plus it lacks actual reasoning to solve novel problems.

Hiring an engineer to finetooth comb blueprints for mistakes before construction will take nearly as much time as having an engineer draft them themselves. And they will be smart enough to not do something silly like putting the electrical panel on the back of the shower wall. If you just vibecode some blueprints and start construction without the comb you could lose way more than you saved with something as simple as pouring a support pillar or building a wall 2 inches off and having to tear it out later and rebuild.

Frontier model companies aren’t banking on the general public “wanting” AI. They are on a path to a product that won’t need to be wanted because the entire economy will need it.

It's to the point where if you drop an AI meme or screenshot of text in chat people will mock you. I don't see that getting better?

I really think there’s a concerted effort by the media to demonize AI though. Every third story I see on my news feeds is some sensationalist story about how AI/data centers are bad.

The media does have an interest in doing this—writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.

Not ever profession has an insatiable desire to automate away their own jobs.

There needs to be a brutal humbling

They didn't overestimate the interest. ChatGPT is extremely popular and notable.

>The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet

Of course they don't, but they are still allowed to make a product, and pivot if there's no consumer demand. However there is huge consumer and business demand for AI so they are justified in making the investments they are.

I have said this before, I just can NOT understand how you can measure adoption of a technology or product without giving people a full opt-out.

This is very basic in technology products.

It is very easy to say that Gmail AI product has 1.8 Billion users because there are about 1.8 Billion Gmail accounts/users and they have absolutely no way of completely opting out. (opting out without the company punishing users by taking away important features)

A simple A/B Test with just 50,000 or 100,000 users depending on the product will give everyone the REAL picture of where users stand.

> the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest.

You should consider that the industry is just lying to make everyone believe that everyone else is interested. Creating a sense of inevitability. It's the same trick that every ad out there uses, selling you a profitable fantasy as reality.

AI seems to have a different impact here: https://fortune.com/2026/05/20/why-do-kids-hate-ai-gen-z-bac...

Ah, they're using the wrong model, of course. "AI" hasn't failed, it's the users who are wrong.

I think there is a valid point here that Anthropic has a found a great product-market fit among programmers.

By comparison, all the rest of the tools non-programmers get exposure to are floundering around trying to be everything to everyone. It's a push not a pull.

The rest of the pack, when given everyday real-world computing tasks, for people that don't know what a terminal is, just suck. (e.g. "copilot, fix the spacing issue in this word document" or literally any apple genmoji attempt with more than two basic english words)

Is Claude really that much better than all the others for normal use?

Yeah, I'm sure the public will totally 180 on AI as soon as the newest model release rolls out lmfao

> Claude has been quite helpful in reviewing my investments, and I have made a fair amount of money on his advice. His availability is unparalleled compared to any sort of financial planner.

Just out of curiosity, what are some investment moves that you made as a result of Claude's advice?

"In a bull market, everyone's a genius."

Interracial and gay marriage were not "wildly unpopular" "technological innovations". What an extraordinary stretch to try to tie the in-fact deeply unpopular, job-destroying and wealth-concentrating AI boom to human--HUMAN--rights victories.

Stubbing my toe fucking sucks, but perhaps the fact that I think it sucks is actually evidence that it is secretly a good thing!

Everyone is going to dislike this comment because you're cutting across two different polarized groups and comment sections rarely champion the middle ground.

Slavery is currently wildly unpopular in the US. Does that mean that the public is therefore wrong and slavery will be making a comeback soon?

Throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not think the Apollo moon missions were worth the cost.

Polls like these always remimnd me that I need set up a investing strategy that does the opposite of public sentiment.

This comment is a fantastic example of AI-proponents' hubris, delusion, and fundamental lack of understanding of humanity these days. Great work.

This is definitely a take.

This is an insane take.

Also wrong, gay marriage had 60% support before Obergefell v. Hodges.

Unless you’re in the top 5-10% of American society, it’s unclear that your kids will be more comfortable than you. Data here:

https://economicprinciples.org/Why-and-How-Capitalism-Needs-...

At the core, this is what the pessimism is about. If AI replicates the advent of personal computers and the Internet, our society will look more like India where everyone has technology but only 5-10% of people live really well

Cars are not something that didn’t exist and then was suddendly invented; it has slowly evolved over centuries.

This is an accurate take. From a tech perspective, AI and ML are great. It's a neat and successful experiment that has a lot to offer.

The fact it's being pushed on all of us as this panacea for the cost of human effort is just disgusting, even if the technology is truly impressive.

Every company salivated at the thought of using AI to enrich themselves, but not a single thought seems to have been given to the human element of it all.

The empirical data doesn’t support this view.

Capitalism approval rates in the US is much more favorable than 16%.

That's part of it, but views on AI are also views on art and authenticity. I'm a huge fan of AI for coding, research and writing for work. When I see AI generated images, music or anything else "creative" my reaction has grown to be pretty negative. It's all got NFT vibes aesthetically.

I was absolutely blown away by Stable Diffusion and that AI could generate images, now I'm kind of disgusted with it. We've been flooded with low artistic value output and people are having a natural reaction to that.

the AI bros would counterargue and say that with all the increased productivity, it will just open up more opportunities and thus more jobs. But, i don't think we're seeing that. Net jobs seems to be going down.

That's what I am thinking. Things are moving fast so from the inside the tech bubble it seems that everyone wants to use AI. That is not true for most people.

Is something a net benefit if the upsides are hypothetical and the downsides are extant?

Not everyone who likes something that you don't like is an X-bro, so maybe that clears things up.

>The public is always against new technology that makes jobs obsolete.

What backlash was there to the computer?

It's pretty telling that only 16% have a positive view on it, then. If even Trump has more than twice as high approval than your product, you've royally fucked up.

It's interesting that you (and, I'm guessing, a majority of HN folk who comment) feel that conservative intellectuals like Thomas Sowell, Victor Davis Hanson, John Mearsheimer, Niall Ferguson, Harvey Mansfield, Heather Mac Donald to quote only a few, voted for Trump. Are these people idiots or partook of some low scheming advantage as a result?

This wildly assumes that "I voted for $candidate" means "I like $candidate." Every presidential election cycle we get served up two turds, one with a (D) and the other with an (R) by their name, and we have to pick which turd we'd like to ruin our country for us the least.

Citations, please

it’s not been useful anywhere else - no self driving cars, no laundry helpers - just some idiotic animatronic carcasses that are barely able to walk around, and semi autonomous killer bots on ukraine frontlines.

Sir, this is a Wendy's.