Why Are People Not Excited for AI

This is just a compilation of my observations in my day-to-day life asking people about AI. I could very well just be hanging out with haters and not even know it. I should also probably say that of course I’m biased because I’m a programmer and also I love my job.

Generally speaking, only two groups of people are really excited about the current renaissance in artificial intelligence research: students who use it to “study” and tech enthusiasts who see money to be made. But every working-class person outside of the tech sphere I’ve talked to seems to have the same apathetic and sometimes pessimistic reaction to AI.

The Carrot and the Stick

Much of what initially excited people about tech, dating back to the invention of the personal computer, is the idea that it would make our lives easier. That we’d have lighter workloads and better work-life balances. While the individual tasks might have gotten easier, the truth is that the expected productivity of each person has only inflated in response. What’s even more interesting is the fact that while productivity has increased, wages have largely stayed the exact same. I have a personal anecdote about this. Programming! AI tools have revolutionized the way that programmers work. The speed at which we can understand and solve problems has increased significantly. But the simple truth is that it has not made the profession any easier. It’s only raised the bar for what the average developer is expected to be able to accomplish in a single workday. Developers who know how to leverage AI tools effectively are becoming the standard and everyone else is left behind in the past.

This isn’t a new concept. It’s probably one of the oldest. One of the main selling points of capitalism is that as companies bring forth innovations, the amount of time that people spend on a task would decrease while the amount of time that people work would stay essentially fixed. Thus the overall productivity of each individual would gradually increase. The end goal is to push society forward.

I think more and more people are becoming aware of this concept. More people are becoming disillusioned with the promises of big tech. Returning to our initial example of the two groups of people most excited about AI: new tools that students have been able to leverage are progressing far faster than the curriculum can adapt and entrepreneurs tend to be good at detaching their value from their actual hours worked. In the best case scenario, everyone else still has to show up to work Monday through Friday, 8 hours a day to get paid the same amount they always have, only to have higher expectations for what they can accomplish. In the worst-case scenario, there is no job to show up to.

Fear

First of all, people are always afraid of new things, but that’s nothing new.

Before I wanted to be a programmer I wanted to be a neurologist. Throughout middle school, I enrolled in every medical program I could and even picked my high school based on that assumption. I always liked figuring out how things worked and experimenting. It was always between tech and medicine. What pushed me to tech was its accessibility. The fact that I can wake up in the middle of the night, build an app, and release it to the public without having to go through any kind of governing body felt so freeing. It allowed programming to become a form of self-expression for me. The same can’t be said about neurology. Going from an idea to an experiment requires having multiple degrees, getting funding for research, dealing with all kinds of legal red tape, and then at the end of the day you still can’t kill the people you’re experimenting with.

Looking back at it, it’s a blessing for all of us that I abandoned neurology. For as long as tech has been at the forefront of the public consciousness, that “Jaden mindset” has been the pervasive one throughout the industry. Software development as a whole remains relatively unregulated and any attempts to regulate it have been met with strong resistance from people like younger me. It has allowed for innovation within tech to flourish and allows for a fast-paced, rapidly evolving market. The only losers are the end users, the people beneath our metaphorical scalpels. The people living with this technology that’s shaping their lives. The experimental group in all of our little trials.

Sometimes these experiments yield genuinely good results, like Minecraft, and sometimes they unleash a Pandora’s box of mental health issues and addiction, like social media. Truth be told, I’ve never considered the impact of the things that I make before I put them out into the world. To me, it feels (I know it’s not) essentially random. But, day after day, people want to hold us more accountable for the chaos we have the potential to unleash.

Conclusion

All of this culminates in the worst imaginable situation for working individuals, the one thing they all absolutely hate. They have to learn something new (ooo so spooky) and they have no idea what it’s going to actually do for them. Their workflows are being disrupted with no guarantee it will benefit them and a very real chance it might harm them.

Also I guess I should mention graphic designers and artists. But they were already struggling so that’s not new.