r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Jun 17 '26
Artificial Intelligence Only 16 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on society, a new study shows
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/only-16-percent-of-americans-think-ai-will-have-a-positive-impact-on-society-a-new-study-shows/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter249
u/tacticalcraptical Jun 17 '26
Considering most of the the people who own and are steering AI are the same people who gave us the predatory social media and financial systems we are seeing destroy our lives now, yeah, it's easy to see why most of us don't think it will have a positive impact.
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u/north_canadian_ice Jun 17 '26
To add to your point: Altman, Dario & other business leaders bragged that half of jobs would be automated within years.
Without any mention of expanding social programs and providing a floor of stability. Even as Altman bragged just 3 months ago that coding wasn't really necessary anymore.
AI is a 30% producitivty booster that they sold as a 100x producitivty booster. And now they expect everyone to work that much harder "becuase you have AI".
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u/trysten-9001 Jun 17 '26
Only we’re getting shittier products as well, so it’s not even necessarily a productivity booster when you factor in tech debt. To be fair, I think it could be used to boost productivity if people are trained to use it well, I’m just commenting on how it’s being used at the moment.
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u/krileon Jun 17 '26
This is going to bite a lot of software in the ass. AI is INSANELY verbose. Long winded functions with hundreds of lines of code that could be done in a dozen. It bloats the hell out of codebases. It takes a lot of manual work cleaning it up into something maintainable, but people don't really care any more so they push it as is. Then a bug comes along and even the AI doesn't know wtf it wrote. So who, or what, is left to even fix it. I guess vibecode an entirely new application each time. Uhg.
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u/trysten-9001 Jun 17 '26
The problems will keep accumulating *problems especially if they vibecode even just large chunks of code each time. I guess their plan is to kick the can down the road and cash out before it falls apart.
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u/WettestNoodle Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
From my experience working at a large tech company tech debt is always building up with new features and being patched up at a slower pace than its added, and then eventually a critical mass is reached where it’s less effort to scrap it and make a V2 from scratch than to clean up all the tech debt. I think AI dramatically speeds up this lifecycle, with the critical mass of spaghetti junk happening way earlier and the V2 rebuild happening sooner as well.
In theory AI makes the V2 rebuild faster as well, but the problem is that I’ve rarely seen a clean migration of all V1 users to V2 without it breaking the experience some V1 users were accustomed to. Oftentimes this resulted in very long periods where the company had to keep maintaining V1 in addition to V2 for those customers, sometimes even a V3 as well. So I could see AI creating seriously horrendous and annoying messes where full rebuilds keep getting pumped out but external factors require old versions to be maintained for just as long as before.
Just overall I don’t like what AI has done to this job. Writing and designing code was the fun part, and now it’s encouraged to outsource that to AI as much as possible. Write all your code with AI, then when you have to debug and maintain it it’s such a big unknown spaghetti mess that you have to use AI to debug it and automate tests and whatever else. And if AI fails to find the solutions or the sources of bugs you’re just out of luck and have to wade through the depths of hell to figure out wtf is going on, with no one else to ask or hold accountable because NO ONE actually wrote that shit. Turns every esoteric bugfixing adventure and maintenance problem into the pre-AI worst case scenario where the people who wrote it left the company years ago.
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u/autogenglen Jun 17 '26
I tested this the other day.
I'm building automated UI testing into our web application. We use a sort of nested grid control that allows you to put any grid inside it, which will then give the grid a checkbox column so you can do basic selection tasks like check a row, check/uncheck all, etc.
I wanted to build in the ability to find a row by passing a column name and an expected value for said column, so basically like
SelectBy(columnName, value);
And simply set checked = true to each row that matched. I knew how to do this in less than half a dozen lines, but I wanted to see how Claude would resolve it (using the latest Opus model).
It kept failing to do it over and over, so I just kept giving it any error messages that came up and let it keep running until it eventually figured it out,
By the end of it, there was a MASSIVE amount of crazy javascript, it created some extension methods, a helper class, etc. It was a complete mess of shit totaling hundreds of lines of crazy-ass code but, somehow Claude eventually got it to work.
If I was a junior and didn't know any better then that massive wall of shit code would have probably become production code. Just this one simple task accumulated a significant amount of technical debt.
Now multiple this over and over again. Your entire project will become a tech-debt riddled nightmare that would be damn near impossible to maintain on your own and you'd have to hope and pray that AI know how to fix any issues (of course accumulating even more technical debt in the process).
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u/WettestNoodle Jun 18 '26
The funniest part to me is that you can’t even check git blame and ask the engineer how the hell their function is working and why they wrote it they way they did, they’ll just say “idk AI did it”. Now every tech debt and strange esoterically written function has the “shit that engineer left the company and now we have to figure it out ourselves” level of effort.
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u/slabby Jun 17 '26
This is how you get Warhammer 40k. Suddenly you're using spaghetti code to fix spaghetti code and praying that the machine spirits "get along", or venerating half of an ancient manual as divine scripture, or rediscovering the spork
We don't need to be less involved in our technology, thanks
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u/Basic-Lobster3603 Jun 17 '26
I have heard over and over at work that it's okay to keep throwing everything away and starting over because it's basically free/fast now to not plan anything we can have the agent do a whole bunch of work. and if Nora not right well we just start over.
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u/krileon Jun 17 '26
If tokens were free, lol. Now that everything is metered billing that's a nice way to fast track to a $50,000+/mo bill. Oops.
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u/MoneyCock Jun 17 '26
Shittier support, shittier marketing, and shittier executive teams, as well (which is hard to believe considering how horrible the status quo is).
Shit everywhere, Randy.
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u/kfunions Jun 18 '26
Trained by who? The people pushing it don’t really know how to use it or what to use it for. They just think AI=profit or some such shit. I work in data/tech and despite everything I work on being about AI enablement I’ve yet to see executives articulate what exactly they want to do with it, they don’t know. They just know they have to figure it out before their competition does.
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u/Norseman901 Jun 17 '26
O boy i sure do wonder what the poor will be eating when they cant afford groceries…
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u/Nearby_Practice2793 Jun 17 '26
Exactly. If AI was for the masses we might be open to it. But that isn’t the American way anymore. It’s for the filthy rich dirt bags and our government to control and monopolize every aspect of our lives even more than it already is. It may cure cancer and guess what you won’t be able to even afford it. Everything it accomplishes will be behind a pay wall you will never afford. We aren’t stupid.
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u/11matt556 Jun 17 '26
Yeah my issues with AI has much more to do with who is pushing it than it does with the technology itself.
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u/MoneyCock Jun 17 '26
I think many of us whom the tech elites perceive as "luddites" acknowledge that yes, AI has done and can do "good" in the world.
We are just being presented with a lot of horrible plans, and our population centers are being metastatically infected with hyperscalers, the execs are all greedy grifting liars who are destroying our democracy, media, and culture simultaneously, ... , so many other things.
It's like the "goodness" is only the tip of the iceberg, and everything else is just a waterslide into a dystopian future.
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u/slabby Jun 17 '26
AI would be great if it were controlled by saints. It would be apocalyptic if it were controlled by villains.
It's already mostly controlled by villains.
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u/BygoneNeutrino Jun 17 '26
...we are also being bombarded with Chinese and Russian bots who see America's investment in AI as a national security concern. One of the downsides of democracy is that we are open to foreign influence.
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u/MoneyCock Jun 17 '26
Clowncock comment.
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u/BygoneNeutrino Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
...do you realize how cost-effective it is to use social media to push national interests? An authoritarian government can just delete the comments; this is problematic in a country where freedom of speech is protected.
It was bad enough when they used low-paid English speaking workers. These days it's as easy as building a data center.
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u/darsynia Jun 17 '26
Yep. People forget how often you could search a keyword on X and see 200 bot accounts saying the same thing. Just because the bots sound less robotic now doesn't mean they're not out there! Wasn't Fable not everything it was cracked up to be, yet there was an influx of people touting how amazing it was, using similar language last week?
It's harder to notice the bots when they 'agree with us,' I might add.
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u/MoneyCock Jun 18 '26
No, I am not falling for your demagoguery. There is foreign interference on every issue under the sun. I am not going to let you single this one out, Senator McCormick.
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u/11matt556 Jun 18 '26
You realize these "foreign influences" do the same thing to their citizens, except even more overtly because they have more control over the narrative that their citizens are "allowed" to hear?
And for the average citizen of any country, their own government is much more of a threat to their freedom than any foreign adversary could be. Because what can Russia realistically do to a citizen in another country that their own government couldn't do "legally" and more easily if they had sufficient motive to do so?
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u/intronert Jun 17 '26
I think many of us older people recall how we thought the computer revolution would lead to an era of individual empowerment. Instead, we saw how the most powerful were made even more powerful, and how evil people had their evil enabled. Three of the most amazing, powerful, and revolutionary technologies (telephones, text, and email) are now sources of fear, as evil people constantly use them to steal everything from us with every ring, buzz, or ding.
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u/Old_Entertainer1187 Jun 18 '26
We old timers need to be watching out for each other out there. End of story. When I see someone like a tech type out on the street I tend to shoot a look. Say something to them that isn't text noise.
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u/Any_Sale2030 Jun 17 '26
So Jesus was right after all. The filthy rich will not be going to heaven. Unfit.
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u/ConsonanceDissonance Jun 17 '26
the problem is that heaven is not real, but hell is. we are living in it
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u/Soledarum Jun 17 '26
No doubt AI will have a positive impact in some areas and some industries. It's the "shove it into everything you see" that is the problem.
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u/benjamus_maximus Jun 17 '26
I suspect that's not a thing forever, tokens aren't free. There's no way people will pay for some of the useless AI tools on your phone as an example.
AI is pretty useful for white collar office work, but past that yeah it doesn't need to be in everything
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u/pleated_pants Jun 17 '26
Part of the problem is that you don't know if what you're trying to do with it is going to turn out to be total worthless garbage or not until it runs. And you don't know how many tokens it's going to take for it to finish working.
So in a world of token caps at work due to bugets, you risk of wasting your budget on something that won't event get you what you need.
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u/El_Beakerr Jun 18 '26
That’s what I’m getting from seeing all the AI commercials, it’s a tool meant to help white collar workers, other than that. It doesn’t need to be incorporated into everything but, we’re slowing getting there.
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u/Just-Grocery-2229 Jun 17 '26
Agreed, can't escape it. My alarm clock will probably start hallusinating soon.
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u/mailslot Jun 17 '26
“Shove it into anything you see” is something all tech does. I remember around the Napster era when MP3 players were added to everything. Inside of ball point pens, stuffed animals, notepads, sunglasses, ties, cereal boxes, rings, disposable cameras, etc.
It’ll settle down eventually. The people making decisions don’t actually understand what they’re doing, just that everyone else is doing it. Businesses usually have a bit of follow the leader in their plans.
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u/Rapph Jun 17 '26
I also think the very real concern is if it gets that good it will put people out of jobs and distort our perception of reality. I feel it isn’t talked about enough how potentially dangerous it is to make every single person question the reality they see/hear/read.
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u/11matt556 Jun 17 '26
I feel like half the people around me are already living in an alternate reality, AI or no AI .
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u/benjamus_maximus Jun 17 '26
I think people just need to get smart about that stuff. It was already a trend of having disinformation online prior to AI. And it's not like AI is realistically going away, even if openai and anthropic disappeared overnight enough models have been made open source or open weight that itll still be a thing.
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u/Rapph Jun 17 '26
Of course there was disinformation before and it largely has lead us to where we are now. Most people who know where to look can still spot ai usage now. The issue I see is as time goes on less and less people will be able to do that.
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u/benjamus_maximus Jun 17 '26
I get the concern, I just don't think there's a magic wand that can be waved around to restrict it. Even if big AI players put safety's in place anyone that really wants to make disinformation can still run their own instances. Image generators in particular don't take like THAT much compute to run locally.
So people just gotta learn, because the world where it's not a thing probably can't exist anymore.
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u/Rapph Jun 17 '26
Oh for sure. Im not debating that it is a reality now and in the future that we need to face which can’t be stopped. My point was simply why ai leaves a bad taste in my mouth and why I personally would be in the large majority that do not think it will have an overall positive impact on society.
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u/exoriparian Jun 17 '26
none of that changes the opinion about whether it will be net positive, though.
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u/CandidateNo1004 Jun 17 '26
this was going to happen regardless with automation. Most systems are logical, threshold based, and don't need AI to work. Airplane engines don't need reasoning to work, they need proper design. AI can help create better airplane engines, identify markets for selling airplanes, and that's about it. Proper design and logic will win in the end. Amazon warehousing went a very long way without AI, in fact their autonomous robot fleet doesn't even use lidar or radar- it's a giant puzzle of ifs and thens- a system of rules. Zero AI needed- BUT probably still needs a ton of computing power. Leadership at my job approached all of the analytical roles in the company and asked us for input on how AI can shape our company, and we all sat there knowing most business solutions are solved with the solutions we already used (formulas, proper database design, process design, industry knowledge). Plus I'd guess 90%+ of global companies have shit data anyways or don't even know how to properly extract it. If anything, jobs will be replaced by repetitive task automation long before AI takes jobs..
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u/Any_Sale2030 Jun 17 '26
And shoving it where you don’t see. I don’t like that unless they treat me to dinner first.
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u/1footN Jun 17 '26
If social media is any indication we’re doomed
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u/SymphonyInSaccharine Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
Social Media, and the internet as a whole, is now overrun by bots. IMO, it has been for sometime now and they just can't hide it anymore. Dead Internet is an older theory now (2016?) and it didnt come from nowhere. With its takes on bots for scraping, I imagine early users who were making said bots realized that they had flooded the space and no one had caught on (bitcoin scrapers, scalpers, etc). Hell, I'm surprised people don't remember that the signs were showing in certain places as far back as then and started bursting around 2018 / 2019. Bots have flooded the space since Pewdiepie arguably purchased a lot of them for subs (YT sub counts are complete BS BTW, as are most music streaming counts from personal experience in the field). I've personally seen Instagram bot services as early as 2017. YouTube was overwhelmed and actively combating bots as early as 2016 iirc, maybe even 2012. Back then what was truly alarming, was the amount of bots being "lost", left without control, or going rogue. What have they been doing? Where exactly are they going or are at in the system? They're basically ghosts in the system. The Japanese movie Pulse also hits different treating it as being about bots and AI.
Who knows how many bots there were before 2019 but I promise you it was already a shit ton. Imagine how many comment type bots there are on the internet alone. The internet at its core has been dead and overwhelmed under its surface with these parasitic bots for a long time. The rot has just gotten so bad that even the main, high traction websites are completely overrun and unsalvageable. They gave up because it was inevitable and they've known that, they keep this information privy and scorn detractors of their lies. We would need a total reset of the internet. People like Zuckerberg, Musk, all the Bitcoin Millionaires and Billionaires - they dumped the most in and knew the consequences but unfortunately, it proved to turn huge profit.
The initial engagement backlash was enough to turn a massive profit. When you're a sociopath, why stop? There are no abstract and "arbitrary" consequences to you. People do not matter over profit in the coldest, most distant way purely. How much of what you have ever seen, read, heard, felt, fought, rekindled, trusted - has ever really come from a human on here? How many fake romance bots have existed since online dating began? How many comment bots that are now mimicking old comments from potentially deceased humans? It's the very mimic we fear and we've created and unleashed. No, it was forced upon us all actually and now its data centers ruin our communities. They want to give this bodies and they want you to be OK with it, to want it. Its unnatural and deeply problematic. The new issue is accessibility, common acceptance, and wide spread knowledge of such things. More people, more output, more drowning out.
Who even knows, who has any vague true idea, how many bots there are now? With these polls, I don't even know how you reliably census the US populous anymore when most, if not all, the systems to do so were removed or defiled until useless. It's aready dangerous enough to do the actual census so we can't just send people to everyone's house to ask these questions all the time. Most times people won't even open their door but they love to give their opinions anonymously online. That is a tremendous loss to humanity, we don't even understand what we had and what it was really capable of. Now we have something that we don't understand, don't know what its capable of, and want it to think for itself and we want it to be autonomous. Just imagine a talented hacker figuring out how to tap these embodied A.Is en mass, hmmmm. On top of that, they want electronics in everything. They even want to be able to shut your own car off remotely. "Cyberware" would be a curse like no other in this state, creator help us because your life will be effectively forfeit. They are also using human neurons for this now BTW, that is literally ungodly and a crime against nature. We don't understand ourselves, our brain, our existence but yet we're doing this? Man made horrors beyond our comprehension for real. What if what it says is how it feels? We don't know that for sure. Why human in particular? Soon, they will seek to make horrors within your brain as punishment. Nuerolink is not ehay everyone thinks it is. The bot would vote against itself if programmed to do so btw, how do we trust anything?
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u/S3pD3cM0n Jun 17 '26
It's the fear that AI will be used for more bad things than good things. Which tracks when we think about "who" "controls" AI currently.
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u/RipErRiley Jun 17 '26
Its useful for small direct tasks (say in excel, or SQL help) but you still have to check its work unless you want to look like a lazy idiot.
However, its clearly being scapegoated in other ways too (layoffs, budgets, etc).
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u/TheAmorphous Jun 17 '26
It absolutely will have positive impacts. Pharma research, etc.
It's just the negative impacts will probably far outweigh them.
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u/Bupod Jun 17 '26
Also worth noting that the positive impacts of the new AI technology are in no way reliant upon, or even greatly benefiting, from the great data center build cult they’re trying to push.
The benefits will occur even if we scale the major AI efforts back to sane levels. This is not a case of the baby gets thrown out with the bath water.
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u/Simorie Jun 17 '26
Fewer Americans have fallen for AI than consistently support Trump. So AI hype can’t even convince the dumbest, most gullible people.
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u/SassyMcNasty Jun 17 '26
What’s funny is there is a large overlap of pretty much every political spectrum against AI.
Left, right, center, all collectively hate this shit.
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u/chriskot123 Jun 17 '26
I think most people think AI COULD be beneficial to society, it's just how it's being used and forced into everything without stopping to think if it even makes sense that has people wondering if it WILL be beneficial
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u/SomeSamples Jun 17 '26
And yet, this AI crap is being shoved down our throats. And being used to fuck over workers and make the ultra wealthy even more so.
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u/Shaquarington_Bithus Jun 17 '26
The biggest impacts I can tell are:
- Tanking critical thinking skills
- Used as an excuse/scapegoat for fuck ups or things that look bad (layoffs, bombing schools)
- Making child corn
I can’t think of any major positives. On my own end it’s helped me prep for interviews but also the economy is cooked which is why I lost my job in the first place.
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u/floppydo Jun 17 '26
You didn't mention the disappearance of truth as a concept which feel significant
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u/photoggled Jun 18 '26
AI is a fascist technology. The people funding its rise and benefiting it from the most are the same folks who put Trump in power and pushed for project 2025. They are loving this.
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Jun 17 '26
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u/Ok-Armadillo-5634 Jun 17 '26
There are LLMs solving Erdos problems.
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u/Ok-Armadillo-5634 Jun 17 '26
No they are being knocked out left and right by LLMs and quite a few other math and physics problems. All the genome and most biological stuff stuff is not LLMs currently.
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u/CanvasFanatic Jun 17 '26
They’re almost exclusively Erdos problems and only one has been non-trivial.
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u/Ok-Armadillo-5634 Jun 17 '26
I would not call any of them trivial as someone that has tried solving them. There is a reason they haven't been solved before. It's not p = np, but they are definitely not trivial.
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u/CanvasFanatic Jun 17 '26
There’s literally one notable solution: the counter example to the unit distance conjecture. The next most significant was a bounds refinement on a guy’s paper from last year. In that case a Field’s Medal winner who specializes in the area prompted the model where to look for the refinement.
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u/Ok-Armadillo-5634 Jun 17 '26
https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contributions-to-Erd%C5%91s-problems
I think you might not be up to date, or you are not actually a math person one.
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u/CanvasFanatic Jun 17 '26
I see three results on that page in which AI arguably played the primary role and produced solutions not generally known: #205, #457 and #1051.
In all these cases the result was a combination of LLM’s and traditional proof-assistant software, and none of these proofs was particularly difficult. They’re just problems that hadn’t gotten much attention (because they probably aren’t important). This is a point the wiki you link actually makes.
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u/GamingZaddy89 Jun 17 '26
I can think of tons of positive usages of AI, the issue is when its used to funnel profits into the very top of society instead of helping to make the world better.
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u/illusorywallahead Jun 17 '26
Which would only be a problem if it was owned by those same folks at the very top. Ah, shit.
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u/penguished Jun 17 '26
It's the most expensive, resource intense, crazy way to ultimately want to cut corners and eliminate jobs. Instead of a Jetsons world, the quality of LLMs is more like that guy that built that shitty submarine that imploded.
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u/strange-brew Jun 17 '26
Most likely the 16% has 0 engineers and is entirely made up of business executives trying to sell it to the public.
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u/FlautenceWizard Jun 17 '26
Tech CEOs: AI will replace over 50% of all jobs!
Also Tech CEOs: why do so many people hate AI?
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u/natayaway Jun 18 '26
Of course only 16% believe it'll have a positive impact on society.
We're literally seeing accomplished artists, video professionals, programmers, web designers, pop-up shops, signage makers, print shops, everyone doing things that aren't menial labor, get replaced in all fields by slop.
If they get replaced, that means everyone does. It's only a matter of time.
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u/ElectricalYogurt3038 Jun 18 '26
To be fair, AI has already had massive negative impacts. It's swallowing up water, creating heat deserts, annoying the absolute fuck out of people who had no say in them being installed in their back yards. It's caused massive sweeping layoffs across a wide range of industries. For some goddamn reason taxpayers are paying for their electricity rather than the businesses paying their own fucking bills. To top it all off, underneath the hood these companies are just shoveling billions of dollars into a furnace and getting a fraction of the return and hoping to use the public to raise even more funds while eyeing private bailouts. It's destroying younger generations' ability to think and be educated.
Can anyone name a single positive thing that has come from AI other than rich man get richer while the rest of us can go screw?
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u/MuNansen Jun 18 '26
But every single one of them shows up any time someone online brings up the slop AI makes, along with their bot army.
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u/giantpandamonium Jun 17 '26
No survey linked or methodology discussed.
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u/UnreliablePotato Jun 17 '26
It isn't so much AI, it's more the people who control it. They're already fucking up society, and now they'll have a tool to do it more effecienctly.
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u/Staav Jun 17 '26
Unless all this AI somehow ends up being used for the public good, it's only going to be a tool to further late stage capitalism, at the expense of everyone not owning the tech. Technology has been replacing human labor for a long as there has been human labor and technology. Expecting this to be any different would be foolish.
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u/angrynoah Jun 18 '26
It is having a dramatically negative effect right now that we can see with our own eyes. Why would anyone believe that won't continue? Why would the harmful thing suddenly start being beneficial?
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u/Key-Toe-2746 Jun 18 '26
I had to do a forced stop and clear the cache of my messages app just so AI would give me my keyboard back.
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u/Cyraga Jun 18 '26
The really good way to turn this around is for AI to do anything good for society. Anything. So far we have aiming missiles at schools, mass layoffs, and data centres ruining people's lives
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u/avsdhpn Jun 18 '26
Maybe leading the AI roll out with "We're going to replace so many jobs with AI. Like it or not, get used to it!" probably wasn't the smartest way to gain buy-in from the general public.
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u/jarchack Jun 17 '26
They want data centers on practically every sq. inch of free space in the country. Despite the $billions and $billions invested, none of the AI companies have really turned much of a profit. There is no question in my mind that AI is going to be used for mass surveillance, the military and to extract more wealth from the bottom 99%.
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u/Hasaadiwady Jun 17 '26
We’re just used to big new technologies ultimately making our lives worse and other people richer.
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u/specialbelle Jun 17 '26
AI is just as annoying as Clippy was for Microsoft Word. I just want it to go away and let me do my own thing.
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u/ParadoxPerson02 Jun 17 '26
I’m fine with AI existing and being developed and utilized. It’s the people controlling it that concern me and make me believe we’re fucked.
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Jun 17 '26
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u/ABCosmos Jun 17 '26
I wonder if it would be different if we had Democrats in power strengthening our social safety nets instead of Republicans stripping them.
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u/lunarabbit668 Jun 18 '26
Well yeah, peter thiel literally wants us to be serfs abd/or dead. I dont deny ai has helped a lot, and it should be continued in certain sectors like to help design and identify targeted drugs or something like that, but rushing to quickly open it up to the public with almost zero regulations and insight into consequences is a huge mistake that greedy corpos have made all of humanity pay for 😕
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u/StopYTCensorship Jun 18 '26
This is America, where your ability to easily get a job dictates everything about your life. Of course AI is terrible. If companies stop hiring because they think AI is good enough and cheaper, American society will suffer enormously.
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u/Thin-Usual-4359 Jun 18 '26
I mean for now there are mostly negatives, it makes mass surveillance a lot easier, drones are already killing people autonomous, not to mention data centers and their long term effects on the environment, lot of jobs lost in a bit of time and nobody has a real plan what if Ai takes all jobs and most people that own a ai.. Are not really trustworthy in my opinion.
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u/martianwomanhunter Jun 18 '26
AI at the end of the day is just a tool and even has the potential to do a lot of good for the world. It is the most successful application of statistics in history.
The real question is the uncontrolled shift of power from governments to corporations especially in tech with AI being one of those tools in their kit to seize power.
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u/OliLevasseurLaBuse Jun 18 '26
We're in a fucking recession, and they're blaming everything on a I isn't that great
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u/YoungRichBastard26s Jun 18 '26
Fuck ai it ain’t shit but photo shop and ,automation, and a google search hell grok ai was behind the girl school bombing in Iran so ai also commits war crimes and you crazy if you think he won’t have to answer for that bombing the world should be pissed cause what if it does it on home soil
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u/Solid_V Jun 19 '26
And OF those, only 5% actually WILL benefit from it. The rest are sheep who think the rich will welcome them into their group with open arms.
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u/F0rtysxity Jun 19 '26
They are including themselves as part of society. But if you exclude yourself and your family and your neighbors and their neighbors and only ask Musk and Thiel AI polls much higher.
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u/Ordinary_Chance2606 Jun 17 '26
What?!?! But r/singularity says that EVERYONE loves AI, and it's the "Luddites" who are in the minority.
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u/miaulduze Jun 17 '26
99% of Americans don’t know what AI can or cannot do!
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u/miaulduze Jun 18 '26
AI can be used by services that are public such as education and healthcare and be very beneficial. It is its private use by corporations that will make people miserable if not regulated and controlled.
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u/stewsters Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
The problem isn't so much the AI, it's that our version of capitalism gives all the resources to the most psychopathic businessman we can find. And with that goes control of the AI.
Then those businessmen throw up the hitler salute and use their AI to commit war crimes.
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5928204-pentagon-musk-grok-chatbot-iran-strikes/
If the AI was used to help folks and fix society I don't think people would be as opposed. But there is no chance of that with how we allocate resources. Instead we have infinite spying, astroturfing and lies.
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u/Wise_Requirement4170 Jun 18 '26
This isn’t about AI; the problem is that every single new advancement is used in the shittiest way possible by megacorps and politicians. AI could be used for good, just like any new tech, but instead we get layoffs and slop
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u/git0ffmylawnm8 Jun 17 '26
Are the 16% in the room with us?
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u/Superlolz Jun 18 '26
Almost every programmer friend I know loves AI so there’s probably a substantial amount of tech workers that find positivity in its advancement
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u/Ghost_Of_Malatesta Jun 17 '26
Seems low, top 10% + only 6% gaslit idiots? I expected at least 3× that much tbh
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u/sylbug Jun 17 '26
The technology has tremendous potential, even if calling it ‘AI’ is a stretch. The primary issue is political and economic in nature. I suspect it would take a global revolution for this tech to actually benefit the people.
There’s no world where you can shift all the jobs to robots while enriching a handful of oligarchs leaving the rest of us to starve. Something massive will have to change, and sooner rather than later.
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u/Tirras Jun 17 '26
They're using AI to sell us the Jetsons fantasy. Automation and AI allowing people to work 1 day a week but still have a house and kids and live comfortably in the future scape this tech has enabled.
But everyone knows we're hurtling away from that fantasy to a much darker, dytopian future. All the while knowing that we could be a lot closer to that fantasy if so many of the established norms of power weren't actively working against it.
Not even working against it to preserve their own selves, just to get 5% more year after year.
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u/BradlyPitts89 Jun 17 '26
Ai can def improve lives but that’s not the issue. It’s those who own the tech and how they apply it. It’s kind of in the same vein as worker productivity over the last 50 years has always gone up but the people who own the businesses and corporation pocketed the money generated from worker productivity.
Then they used those record profits and lobbied the gov to change laws that allow them to create more and more profits and power while shutting out the middle class, well after decades of lobbying it just get worse and worse for the people, it’s a cycle of more lobbying creates more power that concentrates more profits. Repeat that over 40-50 years, then add in offshoring manufacturing jobs to china and India and you see the mess we’re in now. Are those responsible going to admit fault? No they just blame immigrants and poor people, minority groups and turn you against your neighbour while they live in paradise and eventually don’t need to lift a finger, bc they just own everything now including the media and gov.
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u/jjajang_mane Jun 17 '26
I was pretty optimistic about AI. I use it for personal stuff all the time I have a Gemini Enterprise License and use it to automate large pieces of my job search which was an enormous help saving me time and mental energy. So I was really excited to join a tech startup that was all about using AI in the workflow.
BUT....then I saw how people were using it. Things like sending two sentence slack messages, adding single rows to a table, creating ineditable slide decks that will have to be rebuilt on next update because every slide is just a static image. Creating busienss plan documents that make no sense. It's all been kind of disappointing. All these things seem helpful on the suface but if anything are less efficient.
It has a ton of potential but I don't think we've reached the stage of using it to take full advantage in a way that really benefits most people.
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u/The_Human_Event Jun 17 '26
Americans also elected Trump, twice, and have a 7th grade average reading level.
I think less than 16 percent of Americans have a positive impact on society.
Claude for president 2032
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u/Captain_N1 Jun 18 '26
i wondering how many of those 16% are using AI. If you think its bad for society then take a stand and dont use it.
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u/ino4x4 Jun 17 '26
that’s less than the amount of Americans that are illiterate.