I can't blame regular, every day folks from being scared or angry about AI.
Too many AI execs were out there shouting about how AI would take all the jobs, eat your children, and kill your puppies.
If I heard that as I regular person, I'd go, "Uh, WTF? No way, we don't want that! How do we stop that?"
There are also actual lunatics whose job it is to scare them. They get paid to write books and go on podcasts and the news and talk crazy town about AI killing us all and how only mass authoritarianism can save them.
In any other time before social media they would be confined to the lunatic fringe. But today, any crazy train can get 1M followers.
Unfortunately, what regular people are worried about with AI is not grounded in reality. They've been terrified by scary bedtime stories by highly neurodivergent folks who read too much sci-fi and thought it was a documentary or who are just hallucinating like Tim Leary on a bad bender that they're rational when they're totally irrational.
Let's be clear, there are real fears about AI. But they're not the ones anyone is talking about. They are:
Mass surveillance and war.
Not one thing is being done about either and it will not be because government will always reserve the right to do both and will never restrict themselves on either front. Full stop.
Or how about, privacy?
Nothing being done about it.
Talk to your AI about your pending divorce and watch it show up in court. We are going in the opposite direction and people are cheering it on like it's a good thing.
When you see the complaints about AI, they make no sense because they make no sense at the surface level. They are nonsense arguments but you can't understand those arguments based on the content of the argument. You have to understand that it is a deeper fear that is rising from the well and the person has no context or compass to express it clearly and rationality so they come up with something, anything, to express that fear, even if it makes no sense.
In essence, all they are saying is: "I'm scared and I don't like this."
The actual complaints are not tethered to reality. But they are real emotions.
And that fear was created by an astroturfed info war campaign, deeper fears about powerful people and big business and the very things people in the industry said coming back to haunt them like chickens coming home to roost.
It's irrational. But it makes sense. It's understandable.
We've got to do much better as an industry and show people a powerful and positive future.
Nobody riots against a future they can see themselves in.
We've got to show them a better one.