Everybody’s Weirded Out by AI—Except the People Who Foist It on Us

They foresee an Idiocracy-like future where technology is treated like magic. Society survives entirely through extreme automation, but the everyday population has completely lost the understanding of how or why anything works, relying purely on habit—i.e., AI generates mountains of code, but no one is left who can understand it.

There is a rare consensus between Democratic and Republican voters that they dislike data centers using up their water, creating heat domes and noise pollution in their neighborhoods, raising electricity rates, and making it more expensive to buy a computer. There also isn’t a great deal of demand for many of the products AI is offering (like books and movies), leading many expert observers to believe that AI is an investment bubble that will eventually pop.

Most people know about the “faster, cheaper, better—pick two” truism. AI, in both the creative and industrial/engineering worlds, provides such an unbelievable boost to the “faster” and “cheaper (at least for now)” attributes that people are willing to sacrifice quality. Many of them don’t think of the degradation in quality as substantial and consider it a sacrifice worth making. Most people agree that past inventions, in retrospect, were also worth this sacrifice: The printing press eliminated the huge amounts of information memorized by scholars and professionals, and the calculator degraded the human knowledge of the fundamentals of math that the slide rule required. The improvement in speed and cost on one hand, and the sacrifice of quality and human ability on the other, is a level of magnitude above these previous inventions.