The AI backlash is only getting started

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/25/the-ai-backlash-is-only-getting-started

by andsoitis • 26 days ago

98 264 26 days ago

eventinbox• 26 days ago

people conflate "AI is overhyped" with "AI is useless" and neither is quite right. the backlash is mostly against the hype cycle not the tech itself. give it 2 years

throwfaraway135• 26 days ago

AI is already too useful to discard, we could automate 90% bureaucracy and government jobs and no one would feel the difference. But of course fear/angst/rage sells.

shimman2• 26 days ago

AI is so useful they have to subsidize it with trillions of dollars while having no near term profit. AI is so useful that you have to threaten workers in order for them to use the tools.

I'm sorry but all of this is to be determined but if the present is any indicator LLMs tend to make things distinctly worse, not better. Any areas of "potential" still rely on massive amounts of manual human labor, hardly a trillion dollar industry.

"Useful" in the sense of cheap parlor tricks, useful in the real sense that it enables mass surveillance on the cheap; but actually useless for the material lives of people around the world.

I'm sure it's great if you're a rich tech bro.

dippogriff2• 26 days ago

They tried that a few times and the mistakes have had consequences.

dickiedyce• 26 days ago

"...and no one would feel the difference" does speak to the inadequcy of bureaucracy and government execution. Maybe we wouldn't notice the difference with our interactions with bureaucracy and government, but fairly certain we'd notice the jobs market being flooded with Golgafrincham's cast-offs.

adamddev14• 26 days ago

People absolutely would feel the difference if AI models started making 90% of the decisions.

You were just denied an application because some LLM decided you fit a certain statistical pattern. Where did the LLM go wrong? What were the steps taken to make that decision? Who can you appeal to? Nobody. AI bureaucracy would just keep chugging along, making decisions based on prejudices and patterns it finds but doesn't feel.

Rainer Mühlhoff makes some compelling arguments in trying to warn people of the dangers of an AI bureaucracy/state.

marcuskaz• 26 days ago

The US government employees around 3m people, I'm pretty sure 2.7m people losing their jobs would feel the difference.

hvbcvbxcvbcvbx• 26 days ago

Why would you start with literally the only thing keeping you alive?

Automate corporate bullshit. Keep your hands off the government. They are literally the only ones incentivized to not use you as toilet paper.

strken• 26 days ago

I'm starting to think that when non-experts believe a job will be easy to automate with AI, it usually has hidden elements which they don't understand and which make automating it almost impossible.

Meanwhile, there are all these intellectual jobs which are hard for humans to do, so we assume they're just hard in general. Look closer, though, and many don't involve human social interaction, only require a small amount of good taste, and don't have any physical component.

fabianholzer• 26 days ago

The reason for the existence of bloated bureaucracy is political will not the technical inability to automate processes before the advent of the current wave of AI.

rvz• 26 days ago

we could automate 90% bureaucracy and government jobs and no one would feel the difference.

This is really naïve in the long run, since you ultimately cannot solve social problems with technical solutions.

It's always techies that fail to realize the second / third and forth order of events when this level of disruption is measured by the number of mass layoffs you can do in each quarter.

spaqin• 26 days ago

Still haven't seen anything we weren't able to do before. Faster maybe, but still rehashing everything humanity has achieved.

therobots9273• 26 days ago

I think a lot of it is actually the tech for a lot of reasons:

0. No one wants a datacenter in their backyard or hooked up to the grid while the electricity burden is carried by households. People are afraid of losing their property values and being unable to move away if a DC is built nearby - effectively being trapped there. People in Memphis are breathing in gas fumes from the XAI datacenter there. There are concerns about corrosion byproducts making its way into the aquifers from DC waste water. If DC construction takes the cheap option no sound insulation is installed and people can’t sleep and some even lose their hearing: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2...

People are pissed that towns and cities are bypassing public approval to placate corporate builders.

1. People have been told to fear for their jobs

2. Many people believe labs have stolen vast amounts of intellectual property

3. Engineers are being pressured to use AI and told they “aren’t prompting right” if/when it doesn’t work for their use case

I can go on. But I actually think the majority of the backlash has nothing to do with stock valuations.

sanderjd• 26 days ago

I don't think this article is about the backlash among software engineers, but rather society at large. What's going on among software engineers is interesting, but I think it's a different thing, not a microcosm of the mainstream backlash.

cryptopian• 26 days ago

But I actually think the majority of the backlash has nothing to do with stock valuations.

I think it exacerbates the points you make. "You mean, you want to take all the IP, immediately force the tech on us, maybe make my job redundant, and you want billions in funding for it!?"

Borealid2• 26 days ago

What percentage of people do you think are affected by AI datacenters?

That argument applies better to blast furnaces than to data centers, but I don't see people complaining about steel. Data centers just don't take up much space or power in the scope of industrial manufacturing.

Your other arguments are legitimate, but "it's a waste of electricity" and "data centers make some significant difference to a nontrivial number of people" are not the same propositions.

simianwords2• 26 days ago

This is being downvoted but it’s true and it’s obvious. Do people really think the backlash is against stock valuation? Thats insane and shows no theory of mind lol.

frankie_t• 26 days ago

I think AI backlash has less to do with the tech itself and more with its broader impact on society in the current system, if it delivers a quarter of its promises. Those doing the backlashing feel that they are going to lose much more than they are going to gain.

doctorwho42• 26 days ago

If it delivers a quarter of its promises, we enter the likes of the great depression. But instead of everyone feeling the squeeze, you will have literal breakdowns in society because our media-corps have been using the social lives of the wealthy as a distraction for so long...

"Let them eat cake...", I wonder what the 'taken out of context' trigger will be this time around

davidpapermill• 26 days ago

AI also has the misfortune of coinciding with a very difficult period for young people, including limited job opportunities: the financial crash, COVID, Brexit, the political polarisation in the western world.

In some sense it's probably acting as a lightning rod for resentment, and that resentment is combined with marketing spiel from the model companies alongside well-placed concern over the impact of AI on employment.

leoedin• 26 days ago

I've spoken to a lot of people outside of software development who feel this way. It's mainly a sense of "what is this for?". It's obvious that the presence of AI means everyone has to use it, but it isn't obvious yet exactly what good it will bring to most people.

Certainly in my own life it's made some things easier. But that just means I move on to the next thing quicker - the treadmill never stops. Does AI improve my life yet? I'm not so certain. It also has huge environmental costs, pushes up energy prices, pushes up computing hardware prices and sucks attention away from other things.

Is it cool? Yes. Is it likely to be society changing. Yes. Does it make anyone's lives better? TBC.

simianwords2• 26 days ago

This is often repeated but not true. Ed Zitron conflates the two all the time.

mritchie712• 26 days ago

There's another "they took our jobs" group that doesn't fit into "AI is overhyped" or "AI is useless".

They see that AI is capable and fear it.

dgellow2• 26 days ago

They see the leadership reaction to what AI is capable of and fear it.

jerf• 26 days ago

We software engineers have a different experience with AI than most other fields. We have vast arrays of guardrails in our field, with unit testing, CI/CD, source control being relatively easy since we mostly produce textual artifacts, strong typing, compilers with decades of experience in giving targeted error messages, all sorts of things [1]. When AI takes two steps forward and then does something stupid, we have so many guardrails that our harnesses can easily get the error message, feed it back in, and the AI can pick up the pieces and carry on. We hardly even notice this process.

If you watch an AI and dig into the details of everything it is doing, you can see it repeatedly banging into these guard rails. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily. As a human being, I bang into those guard rails all the time too. That's where they came from in the first place, to let humans bang into them. And we've built a lot of them.

However, in a lot of the rest of the world their experience with AI much more resembles that of the more critical voices that post here. A lawyer who uses an AI that makes two correct citations and then an incorrect one has many fewer automated guard rails to work with. It is relatively easy to imagine a system that at least verifies the citation exists (I've heard that's easier said than done due to the system depending on humans to resolve sloppy references but still it's feasible), but the task of deciding if the AI correctly used the citation, either in the abstract sense of it being correct or in the sense of it being the best way to use it to advance the current case, is a vastly harder decision than "ah, that change failed to compile, try again".

Accounting seems like another good example. Yes, it has the obvious guard rail of "do the books balance", but that's the beginning of accounting, not the end. It's difficult to put up guard rails for how the accounting is done from there. An accountant will experience an AI accountant as doing OK sometimes but making really dumb decisions that couldn't be caught by anything other than human review, and I have to imagine that the lack of learning and the way the AI will tend to make the same mistakes over and over must be incredibly aggravating.

I think there's probably more truth to "AI is useless" than we may see. I think a lot more people than we realize have had the experience of using AI a while, putting some trust in it, then having that trust grotesquely violated when it says something stupid in an email or makes boneheaded errors in a spreadsheet. We're maybe just now exiting the portion of the hype cycle where it is simply culturally unacceptable to criticize the AI and entering the part where it is culturally both acceptable and expected, and we software engineers may look on in bafflement at the other fields and their complaints because it's working for us, what's your problem?

[1] https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/programming_is_engineering/

Marsymars• 26 days ago

This makes me think a bit about my wife - she works in a professional field, but ends up spending a bunch of her time on clerical work because it's nearly impossible to hire and keep good assistants.

When I look at the clerical work from a software engineer's point of view, I find it nuts how few guardrails there are - clerical workers would have a far easier time producing work with a low error rate if there were some guardrails put up, but that's just not an investment/culture that the field seems to be interested in.

The two related points around AI are that 1) guardrails would make the clerical work relatively easier for AI and 2) because assistants are so error-prone anyway, the bar for AI isn't all that high.

jcgrillo2• 26 days ago

OK but I already gave it 2yrs. How many 2yr grace periods do they get before it becomes clear they're simply lying?

It really doesn't help to have stuff like this in print:

a technology that could power a surge in productivity and incomes, help find cures for untreatable diseases and improve everything from education to green tech.

They just take these claims completely uncritically and move on. Where is the productivity increase? Where are the cured diseases? Where are the improvements in education and green tech? So far, it's all a big fat zero. Maybe in 2yrs some of this will actually be true? Is that the hope?

This is scammer shit. If any of this was true you wouldn't have to ask for extra time.

EDIT: The fact we're all calling this "AI" is part of the problem. It's not AI yet, it's still ML. The Overton red-shift comes for us all in the end.

__MatrixMan__• 26 days ago

Agreed. We've been working on or with AI for 70 years. What's new is that the billionaires recently started drooling over it.

jasperry• 26 days ago

The proper backlash should be not about its capability level but how it's being used. AI is being adopted to deploy mass surveillance on an unprecedented scale, and to make decisions that affect people's lives without being evaluated by a human first. Those seem worthy of lashing back against.

suzukivenom• 26 days ago

can someone paste the not-paywalled link please

leokeba• 26 days ago

https://archive.is/A1bE8

josefritzishere3• 26 days ago

Frankly, most AI is pretty meh, really only impressing AI enthusiasts, with their near religious fervor. There's a big delta there between power users and everyone else. It writes bad emails, messy code, incorrect metrics, dubious slide decks, ugly graphics... the consumer rejection of AI is only growing. At the same time, the product itself is sold wildly below cost. So it needs to be increase in price at the same time users are rejecting it. This is only ending with a huge market correction.

cryo32• 26 days ago

That’s roughly it.

I don’t really have a use for it myself that I can’t solve some other way cheaper or easier without the damage and uncertainty it does.

I’m not really that impressed.

adamddev14• 26 days ago

It seems by definition "below par" of whatever human activity it's training on. How can we achieve greater and greater heights of intelligence if we're just creeping closer and closer to a sub-par copy of human creative activity.

orangecat• 26 days ago

It seems by definition "below par" of whatever human activity it's training on

How many sub-par mathematicians could solve the unit distance conjecture?

phantompeace3• 26 days ago

How do you know it's being served at wildly below cost? AFAIK API pricing across the board is actually higher than what inference would cost? Yes there are subscription plans that subsidise tokens but they exist primarily to hook people in, so as to encourage their workplace to adopt it, whereby they then have to pay for an enterprise plan with zero subsidies like the subscription plans have. Training is very expensive, but you only do that once.

I predict costs will fall.

lnenad2• 26 days ago

I never understood people like you.

Factually that's just not true. Five years ago current llms would have seen like magic to even data scientists working on them and realistically their impact has been felt by many. Just taking jobs into account, imagine an average worker in an average industry; how do you think something like Fable compares? Worse? By how much?

Like even many years ago we had alphafold that had a non negligible impact on biology, who knows what's gonna happen when this technology grows up.

josefritzishere3• 26 days ago

Sorry but it's painfully true. I now spending time daily like the "reverse-centaur" fixing things that AI has hallucinated, conflated, or just done wrong. It's miserable work. The copy/pasta part is easy.

antihipocrat• 26 days ago

I'm not an AI advocate by any means, but its usefulness is not all or nothing. I use it at work a lot - scanning our documentation + data warehouse + version control system all at once saves me a lot of time. I can let it build boiler plate code (via skills) and the actual code implementation as a template/POC for me to then edit, again saving a lot of time.

Outside of my work - AI video has reached a point where creative artists are generating engaging, realistic content that is genuinely entertaining. IMO the common thread is that in the right hands it can produce amazing things. For anyone without the expertise, it defaults to slop.

ben_w2• 26 days ago

Weird thing I've encountered. I've seen all the stuff you say, but not all at the same time.

The stuff I'm getting from ChatGPT this week has been absolutely garbage. Back in the very early days you might prompt 5 times and see if it was consistent with itself in the conclusion, even if not how it got there; this week it's not even been that. But back in those days the UI was also fast, today it lags massively on relatively short chat sessions.

Ugly, dubious, incorrect, it definitely feels like a regression. And its love of emoji hasn't gone away.

Claude no longer works for me on Safari, only Chrome. No lag at least, but the free message allowance has shrunk a lot.

I'm not too fussed about messy code, given the humans I've worked with, but that's about it.

Even the ChatGPT image model is… for all the improvements in the model itself, the UX isn't good enough to make up for what the model still can't do. In many cases I actively prefer running Stable Diffusion locally because that's easier to fix the last 5% than having to deal with a completely different 5% wrong each time.

But yeah, correction very possible. Was thinking so just on the basis of the % of US electrical power being called for: that can't possibly be sustainable for the broader economy.

vitorfblima7• 26 days ago

The untold promise of IA is to replace labor. That's probably the only reason why some people are willing to spend trillions of dollars in pursuing this technology. Mere tools would never justify this kind of investment. It's no surprise that people are getting angry, even though many are using AI in their everyday life.

gruez7• 26 days ago

The untold promise of [tractors] is to replace labor. [...] Mere tools would never justify this kind of investment.

How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today.

vitorfblima7• 26 days ago

We're talking about ALL labor.

greenavocado4• 26 days ago

The end goal is to mechanize and automate everything to "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature." They are literally telling you this; it's written in stone. Once this is achieved, everyone else can turn into compost.

justonepost28• 26 days ago

How do people still conflate “sectoral changes in the labor market” with “humans become zoo animals”? The scale just seems fundamentally different.

hatefulheart2• 26 days ago

Are you suggesting we can make this comparison because there are no meaningful differences in society from the early 20th century to today?

I reject this argument as bad faith from the start.

watwut5• 26 days ago

I don't know how tractors were sold initially, but AI is sold with open goal of making majority of the people unemployable, "obsolete" and keep it that way. That is literal rhetoric of those companies.

Tractors are tools to make hard boring labor easier.

markus_zhang• 26 days ago

1. It is to replace humans, or at least the majority of them, especially if they can get into Robotics as well, but that's a long shot I think.

2. If 1 happens, it is foreseeable that they don't even need that many slaves to tend to the machines, so not many "new" jobs created I'm afraid.

Comparing that to the computer -- yes if you are a typist you are doomed -- but they still need someone to type -- just not on a typewriter. And there are suddenly countless new requirements (e.g. video games, CGI, etc.) getting created from thin air. I don't really see this happening for AI -- like, do you see any NEW requirements getting created? Sure we are getting endless AI slop games/videos/fictions, but are they new? People can only consume that many products and pumping 100x into the system doesn't work -- except to make profit drop to ZERO for every ordinary creator out there.

BTW I do think there will be new requirements -- robotics combined with AI (e.g. who doesn't want a handsome husband or a beautiful wife?) -- but again it is to replace humans.

3. Apparently, accountability has dropped to a new low, since the end of the Cold War. So naturally cattle and sheep (I mean, us, ordinary people) are scared. Back then at least the elites were willing to make gestures and put up facades. Nowadays they simply don't GAF.

speak_plainly• 26 days ago

I think the technology industry has a long track record of selling false promises, dead ends, and over-hyped solutions.

AI is an interesting experiment with some real-world applications, but it’s no tractor or mechanical loom... not yet, at least, and it’s far from clear that it ever will be.

As things stand today, AI is not the future. It’s a tool with genuine uses that is being marketed as a revolution.

fireflash383• 26 days ago

Do you think that happened bloodlessly with everyone very happy about it?

The industrial revolution came along with massive production of goods that people need and desire. Even then, there was still a huge amount of pushback (it still echoes in a lot of communities today!).

Do you see any differences compared to the AI revolution we're being sold?

estearum11• 26 days ago

Sure, here's a direct answer:

Even after the mechanical loom was created, figuring out the next most important problem to work on was a job that humans did.

Unless you believe there's some hard limit on AI intelligence that will constrain it below the intelligence of a particular earthbound hairless ape, then eventually AI will be perfectly sufficient and probably better at figuring out the next most important problem to work on.

Ta-da, humans are completely removed from the value chain. Neither the loom nor the tractor could not do such a thing.

dofm14• 26 days ago

Tractors and looms displaced labour. Those people got other jobs. In many cases radically worse jobs for the first hundred years; living standards for those people dropped noticeably as they went into industrial mining and factory work.

The pitch for AI is that it's affordable at the insane valuations because it replaces labour.

It takes work out of the labour market entirely — fewer salaries means more money can be freed up that can go to the giant intelligence tap.

Not just some sectors — really all non-manual work sectors at once. Isn't that what the e/acc guys were open about at the beginning? Learn AI or you won't have a job?

Sam Altman was so open about this that he funded a UBI study.

strogonoff• 26 days ago

If comparing past industrialisation and automation events with hypothetical LLM dominance in the workforce, some of my questions would be: (0) how limited is the change to a specific industry (e.g., weaving vs. most of intellectual and creative work by everyone starting from children as soon as they can read and type to the elderly)? (1) how many people are affected—in absolute terms not just percentages that ignore population growth? (2) how quickly are they affected? (3) what can people do—where can people move to where they can keep working (e.g., operating/maintaining/manufacturing tractors and looms, intellectual/white collar work, etc.)? (4) what are the organised reskilling processes in place that facilitate said migration? (5) how competitive and diverse, vs. monopolistic and regulated, are the new industries that power the change? how concentrated is created wealth and how many new jobs do they create? (6) what laws (in letter or in spirit) are violated as the change is happening? (7) if it is shown that the current change is about similar to the past in above aspects, does that imply it’s OK that it happens all over again and we have not learned a lesson to go ahead with these things more carefully so that the majority doesn’t suffer as much?

montjoy• 26 days ago

It’s different because those were singular technological advances, each in their own niche. They spread out change between time, geography, and industries.

The fear is this will replace engineers, scientists, accountants, lawyers, service workers, etc, etc all within a small time window.

Investment types have shown repeatedly that their primary concern is money, not workers. There is no reason to believe that those currently in power are open to sharing their wealth or influence.

ndiddy2• 26 days ago

Well the Industrial Revolution was objectively a worse deal for the average worker. The average preindustrial peasant worked 8-12 hour days, but had Sundays off and at least 120 rest days and holidays. Depending on how good wages were at the time, they may have only had to work between 120 and 180 days per year. Compare that to the 70+ hour weeks workers were made to work all year in factories during the period immediately following the Industrial Revolution. It took over 100 years of collective struggle through the labor movement, as well as technological advances, before labor conditions improved to be something along the lines of what they were in the preindustrial period (at least going by hours worked/year). If you're arguing that AI is going to be similar to this, I do not want to be a wage worker in the period where this takes place, just like I would not have liked to be a wage worker during the Industrial Revolution.

hodgesrm• 26 days ago

How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today.

Regarding US agricultural labor displacement.

* It happened over a period of 200 years or so in the USA. [0] That's a key difference.

* Starting in the late 1800s manufacturing rose to a peak of 38% in 1944. [1] This absorbed a lot of the available labor, often at better rates of pay than farm work. It's a common pattern in industrializing nations where manufacturing absorbs labor freed up by more productive agriculture. Manufacturing labor is no longer growing, so that cannot help with employment.

That's not to say it was pleasant for all concerned. I would argue, however, that black swan events like the Dust Bowl caused more disruption and trauma than the steady displacement of farm labor by technology.

[0] https://u.osu.edu/beef/2022/07/06/the-history-of-american-ag...

[1] https://humanprogress.org/trends/the-changing-nature-of-work...

Edit: clarity

malfist3• 26 days ago

After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today

And how many years did that take to happen? 3 or 4? That's what the AI companies are promising. 89% of you will be unemployed in the next couple years. All that wealth you'd be making from working will now be going to the company owners and you're out on your own. Good luck!

insane_dreamer2• 26 days ago

Here's the difference:

The 90% of workers in agriculture found jobs in industry and services.

Those industry and services will soon largely be performed by AI, with the exception of the lowest paying jobs that are hard or expensive to replace with robots (construction, plumbing, hair styling) or for which demand for actual humans is a key ingredient (prostitution, live entertainment).

So the 90% of workers in today's industry and services will find jobs in ... (fill in the blank)

The problem is, I have not read a single reasonably logical prediction of what _blank_ might be.

baron8163• 26 days ago

This is just how productivity works. If people spend less time building a unit of output, then you have more output.

People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff. Right now, the world can’t come close to making all the stuff people want. As long as there’s a desire for further consumption, there will be work for people to do.

HEmanZ5• 26 days ago

I don’t think the claim is that people will be less productive, the world will be far more productive.

The claim is that the value of most human labor will be at or near enough to 0 compared to deploying capital (robots, ai) to product the same goods. So humanity becomes owners living ludicrously well on highly productive capital and everyone else getting whatever “humanitarian” portion is assigned to them. And no way to move from “permanent underclass” to capital owning class, besides maybe winning the Beast Games.

esafak2• 26 days ago

Is that so? What if machines can fulfill all the economically valuable wants?

customguy5• 26 days ago

But that's just the thing, productivity is so much higher than, say, 50 years ago, while the average worker has less of a perspective (to own a home, start a family, etc. anything stable to work towards essentially). The profits mostly don't go towards the now more productive workers and ensuring their rights and well-being and a habitable world to live in, do they.

mschuster912• 26 days ago

People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff.

The danger arises when people want stuff but cannot afford it as there is no more work and what remains of available work (i.e. trades and sex work) is being fought over heavily, driving down the prices.

When that "cannot afford it" extends to necessary stuff such as housing and food too much, eventually there will be a revolution once people are fed up.

The US is in a particularly bad spot here - in contrast with other countries that experience utter poverty (e.g. Afghanistan), most of the population lives in urban areas and has zero opportunity to at least engage in subsistence farming. Whoops.

insane_dreamer2• 26 days ago

do you really believe this? wow, the Kool-Aid effect is real. So many problems with this argument.

If people spend less time building a unit of output, then you have more output.

there isn't infinite demand for the output. unless they're in an industry with infinity growing demand (which would be ...?), companies are not going to retain their staff and 5x their output, they are going to cut their staff by 80% and 5x their profits. we're already seeing this (not 80% but things are just getting started).

People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff.

wanting stuff and being able to afford stuff are two very different things. if people don't have jobs, they can't buy that much stuff. This is why we will end up with a few very large and profitable providers.

Right now, the world can’t come close to making all the stuff people want.

Completely false.

As long as there’s a desire for further consumption, there will be work for people to do.

No. As long as there is continued consumption, there will be a demand for output of companies most of which will (if the promise of AI holds true) not be fulfilled by humans.

danaris• 26 days ago

Right now, the world can’t come close to making all the stuff people want.

Right now, the world is making all the stuff people need and then some. Poverty and hunger, in the 21st century, are distribution problems. (And, inevitably, politics problems.)

Now, it's true that what people want exceeds what they need (almost by definition). But it doesn't exceed it by so many orders of magnitude that we're that far off from being able to produce it with what we have today.

kakacik• 26 days ago

Yeah I don't know a single normal peer who is properly happy with AI, folks are not stupid. There is like 1-2 semi-autistic high performing folks who have tunnel vision, 0 emotional intelligence/empathy and are just happy to have some powerful toys.

Every single expert I asked in our circle had at least serious doubts they will have jobs in 10 years. Doctors, lawyers, assistants, of course IT folks, various other white collar jobs. Of course managers with FIRE button are very anxious and feel like firing should have been done yesterday as long as resulting damage is manageable, quietly hoping they will not be also made redundant because at the end same logic applies to them and they often add little on top of simple yes/no decisions sucked out of a thumb.

How disconnected somebody has to be to think folks would cheer on something that will cause absolute catastrophe for them and their families. Literally everybody groks it. Nobody expects employers to have any empathy when they could be removed.

I view AI research and dev folks in similar vein as nazi bureaucrats - quietly working efficiently behind the desk, making vast machineries work, without a care in the world on impacts of such work on fellow man.

One hopefully positive aspect is - prices are rising, and when SHTF they should be on level which makes them long term sustainable, making obvious how costly such replacement would be. But I think it will still be worth it in high cost societies unless governments add regulatory & financial friction, in similar vein ie chinese cars have high import fees. If that fails, resulting situation will be a catastrophe since I don't believe in some form of UBI promise as sustainable long term situation, people are way too nasty, greedy etc.

continuational• 26 days ago

Well, what if it "just" increased white collar productivity by 1.5x, what would that be worth?

627467• 26 days ago

untold promise of IA is to replace labor

Untold? AI going for (insert your favorite) jobs has been on headlines, conferences, substacks, etc non-stop before chatgpt was able to consistently reply twice without hallucinating

vitorfblima7• 26 days ago

That's part of it, sure, but the starting narrative has always been to make people more productive.

dippogriff2• 26 days ago

If the labs weren't so aggressive with building datacenters in people's backyards, this could've been a different story. People don't like it when pipelines are built in their backyard either.

gruez7• 26 days ago

From TFA:

The buildings summon a vitriol well beyond conventional nimbyism. More Americans say they would be happy with a nuclear reactor next door than a data centre. Even plans to build one in the Utah desert have met with passionate opposition.

BeetleB8• 26 days ago

BTW, the anti-data center movement predates LLMs by a margin. Near where I live the locals were upset before COVID - they employ very few people, use a lot of land, and pay little to no taxes.

It's just that they're building them at such a large scale now that you see more and more people protesting them.

baron8163• 26 days ago

Are they built in people’s backyards? There’s a famous case in Northern Virginia that has admitted they messed up zoning which gets cited in every story to make it look like they’re all built in people’s backyards, but the vast majority of them are in industrial zones.

BeetleB8• 26 days ago

For a lot of folks (including near where I live), "building in my small city" is the same as "backyard". The narrative is "Use up a lot of land, pay almost no taxes, and employ almost no people."

supermaurio2000• 26 days ago

the most stupid article i've read in the economist

randusername• 26 days ago

TFA gave me brain freeze.

Third, measure everything. The common view that AI is already leading to lay-offs and raising electricity bills is probably wrong. But without better statistics it is hard to be sure.

Why are they syndicating high school economics papers on AI?

layer8• 26 days ago

Despite the headline, the article is largely AI-positive.

To that end, here are four pointers for politicians and AI companies looking for policies.

Extrapolating from the past, none of these are particularly likely to happen, however.

Another notable aspect is that, unlike many other societal issues, the backlash against AI is decidedly bipartisan.

dwa35924• 26 days ago

People have been made to believe by very influential people (dario, sam, elon etc) that AI will replace them. As a result people are getting angry. Who did not see this coming?

Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? There is nothing sexy about it. There is nothing cool about it either.

Imagine a taxi driver facing his family knowing he will be replaced by a machine fully; imagine that taxi driver thinking that there are slick graduates from top schools who wake up everyday (waymo, tesla, zoox) with one goal in mind - let's automate this taxi driver.

The anger against AI/Tech is just starting really.

estearum11• 26 days ago

Just because people are angry does not make it false.

Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines??

Because arms race.

Game dynamics and incentive structures don't cease to exist just because someone notices them.

dweinus• 26 days ago

All those devs and data scientists and PhDs make a choice though. They could quit and work somewhere else. Even in a tough market their skills are in demand. They choose to work on this every morning.

smaudet2• 26 days ago

Because arms race.

The irony is, they are building their own competitor...

Yeah, we get that nobody can trust China/Russia/USA/Shady cabal of too-rich-people, but we stopped the atom bomb because it was MAD (mutually assured destruction).

We need a similar treaty to ban any use of AI in this fashion, because all that will happen is creation of weapons that are inevitably turned on their owners.

And then, yes, as a coalition, declare war on any country that violates this.

I hate to be a proponent for war, but one's coming either way. I'd prefer a relatively peaceful resolution to some of our problems, not a "oh my god the robots have rebelled, and we are losing" scenario.

dofm14• 26 days ago

People have been made to believe by very influential people (dario, sam, elon etc) that AI will replace them. As a result people are getting angry. Who did not see this coming?

Cal Newport calls this "Doom-Trolling" — there was an NYT article, he has talked about it on his youtube channel and there was an actually really great, long discussion with Ed Zitron about it where Ed covered a lot more topic ground than he has been focussed on lately.

He makes the case that this fear-based marketing is causing real harm and unnecessary anxiety and is basically despicable.

dgellow2• 26 days ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-open...

Jtarii• 26 days ago

Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines??

There is a lot of money to be made in the destruction of civilisation.

WarmWash2• 26 days ago

Who did not see this coming?

The general vibe of the internet at least for the last 20 years has been "Work sucks, play is fun, give whatever technology minimizes my need to work and maximizes my wealth and free time"

All these same guys have also talked about the need for UBI, so they basically have been promising the dream of the liberal internet: No work, free money, do whatever you want in your life.

The viability of this dream is pretty debatable, but it definitely checks all the boxes of the internet hivemind as of ~3-4 years ago.

sph• 26 days ago

Are vibecoders working less? I don't think so. I've seen people with a dozen Claude windows open, and I'd rather go dig mud than working like that. There is no universe where you can call that programming despite the end product still being source code.

The people that have won are not the lazy ones. It's the preppy work-hard-not-smart guys high on ADHD medication that feel like gods having a dozen machines spew out millions of lines of code per day, instead of just sitting on a hammock and thinking the easiest way to achieve the goal, with the least amount of effort.

That said, the shift away from 'the best engineer is the lazy engineer' ethos has happened a decade+ ago.

wseqyrku• 26 days ago

On UBI thing, I think it's is a word designed to make people calm down and to feel safe, if they can't find a pathway for the future in their internal dialogues they will go insane. So here, UBI. It's fine.

Jcampuzano24• 26 days ago

Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines?? There is nothing sexy about it. There is nothing cool about it either.

This argument alone doesn't really work because literally billions of peoples jobs and livelihoods have been replaced throughout history from the explicit development of technology that replaces the need for human labor.

The question should not be whether the technology replaces people by machines, it should be whether it provides a net benefit overall. You could use this argument to say we should have never invented the printing press if you only thought of the people who used to manually transcribe books and documents.

beej714• 26 days ago

The question should not be whether the technology replaces people by machines, it should be whether it provides a net benefit overall

I like this framing.

But I wish more people would acknowledge that genAI offloads thinking in ways that the printing press, the loom, the calculator, and the computer never did.

I find a net benefit to be extremely unlikely, but the devil's in the details. We'd have to define "benefit" and that's already a big kettle of worms.

HarHarVeryFunny4• 26 days ago

Yes, but it's trivially obvious that AI is different from previous technological automation, since with AI it's ALL jobs being automated, starting with white collar ones, not just some narrow segment.

What was true with previous automation, that some jobs disappear, but new ones are created in their place, will not be true of AI, because AI is a general purpose technology capable of doing the new jobs it creates just as well as the old ones it displaces.

customguy5• 26 days ago

The question should not be whether the technology replaces people by machines, it should be whether it provides a net benefit overall.

That's just treating the very real, living people, who exist right now, and can read your words, as if they're already dead.

You could use this argument to say we should have never invented the printing press

So, what displaced person will you swap your livelihood with? After all, if it's just about the general arc of progress, and the individual lives don't matter, why not sacrifice yours for that of someone else? The same could be said to those who say "there will always be inequality", life is unfair, etc... it all sounds great but it's really just more words for "fuck you, got mine" IMO.

dwa35924• 26 days ago

>This argument alone doesn't really work because literally billions of peoples jobs and livelihoods have been replaced throughout history from the explicit development of technology that replaces the need for human labor.

"throughout history" - go look at the time it took to replace those jobs. how those jobs were replaced. A trillion dollars will be put into investment this year to put AI in everything. People who's companies those money is going to are actively saying there will be 20-30% job loss.

>The question should not be whether the technology replaces people by machines, it should be whether it provides a net benefit overall.

Define 'net benefit overall'. Does overall include people who's job is getting automated? How skewed the benefit is towards some b(t)illionaires?

tokai• 26 days ago

doesn't really work because literally billions of peoples jobs and livelihoods have been replaced throughout history

And it entailed social unrest every time.

ritcgab• 26 days ago

We cannot talk about net benefit until we agree on the objective: net benefit for whom?

I don't care if my current job is being replaced or the whole industry I am working in vanishes. But as an individual, if the new technology says it aims to wipe out all the possibilities of my future career, it is not net benefit for me.

Just saying "net benefit" "overall" sounds like some collectivism propaganda.

wiseowise• 26 days ago

This argument alone doesn't really work because literally billions of peoples jobs and livelihoods have been replaced throughout history from the explicit development of technology that replaces the need for human labor.

This argument alone works just fine. If you explicitly threaten billions of people that you will make them redundant then you better focus on building a guillotine proof neck.

tengbretson3• 26 days ago

Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines??

Say, you wouldn't happen to write software for a living, would you?

dwa35924• 26 days ago

I do. developed predictive models for health monitoring of large machines and then fraud detection in health care. Why do you ask?

beej714• 26 days ago

Not the GP, but I used to do. And I share the sentiment even though I'm out of the game.

beej714• 26 days ago

I think they just don't care that the people are mad. The equation doesn't include workers. It actively excludes them.

Because no sane person would pitch a product that would put you out of work, it seems surprising to us to hear that pitch. But the pitch isn't to us; we're not part of the equation. We're passive listeners between uncaring, unfeeling parties who only value one thing, and that thing ain't us.

The anger against AI/Tech is just starting really.

That seems like a pretty safe bet at this point.

malfist3• 26 days ago

Aside from one health insurance company CEO, why should they care that the common people are angry with them? It doesn't stop them from doing whatever the hell they want. Even if it's illegal (looking at you memphis data center gas generators)

ptrhvns• 26 days ago

I know what you're saying about their perspective, but the real equation does include the workers. One possible result of being ignorant of that fact is there could be blood on the streets.

coef2• 26 days ago

Ironically, developers may turn out to be easier to replace than taxi drivers. We've seen technological progress replaced workers or made certain roles obsolete, and this may become another example. I hope governments and public institutions take a more active role in supporting people going through the transition.

justonepost28• 26 days ago

Good to know we can maybe count on the government to send us a few 1000 dollar checks on the way to the human zoo.

ben_w2• 26 days ago

Imagine a taxi driver facing his family knowing he will be replaced by a machine fully; imagine that taxi driver thinking that there are slick graduates from top schools who wake up everyday (waymo, tesla, zoox) with one goal in mind - let's automate this taxi driver.

Back when self-driving cars still seemed imminent and Musk hadn't started losing his teflon coating, I asked an actual taxi driver his thoughts about self-driving.

He was looking forward to it.

This surprised me, until I found LLMs were automating coding and found I felt not too different about my own career.

HarHarVeryFunny4• 26 days ago

Presumably your POV depends on whether you believe the capability of AI will somehow stop at coding, so you'll still have your job with a cool new tool, or whether AI will replace your job altogether, in which case perhaps you are planning a career pivot to taxi driver?

throwmeaway876• 26 days ago

Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines??

If they don't do it, others will anyway.

There is nothing sexy about it. There is nothing cool about it either.

I disagree. I think it's very cool having machines that can actually talk to you and do stuff better than you.

I understand why people are upset since they perceive (justifiably) that their livelihoods are threatened and the CEOs and founders only made it worse by fear-mongering. However, the luddism and denial will always be absurd to me.

classified• 26 days ago

There is nothing cool about it either.

The "cool" thing about it is that LLM suppliers will own the workforce of the employers who switched so those employers will be at their mercy. Total power, untold profits.

bvcp• 26 days ago

id rather live in the culture civilisation than the empire of azad

Maledictus• 26 days ago

https://archive.is/A1bE8

pelotron• 26 days ago

"AI promises to change the world for the better" - so far it's clear the world will be better for a few people. A promise that it will be better for everyone reads like "trust me, bro."

"Blockers need to be shown that their local area will benefit if they get out of the way." Benefit how? Will this be like when your city convinces you it's in everyone's interest to subsidize the latest billionaire-owned sports stadium?

"If America succumbs [to popular rage], it could cede the global ai frontier" ah here we go. The next generation of Too Big To Fail.

adrians16• 26 days ago

Remember the debate about how nuclear was stopped in the 70s because of NIMBYism? We are now wondering "how could people then be so stupid and shortsighted?". Well, there you go, here's history repeating before our eyes.

estearum11• 26 days ago

Not really. Nuclear power (in both the weapon and energy sense) is and always was relatively easy to manage compared to AI.

If the deployment of nuclear energy required the distribution of radioactive material to every smartphone in America and for unstable isotopes to be plugged into the core operating infrastructure of every industry, then they'd be a lot closer to analogous.

adrians16• 26 days ago

Of course. Those people back then were stupid and irrational and couldn't see they were wrong.

Today we are much more enlightened and smart, and our convoluted arguments, that sound very smart and somehow reach the same conclusion that the technology must be stopped, are totally right. We're not opposed to AI due to irrational fear and NIMBYism, like those simpletons before.

xydone3• 26 days ago

I have a feeling that comparing a safe, sustainable energy source to large language models is disingenuous. If you support LLMs and the field, you can just state it outright, without insincere comparisons.

rurp• 26 days ago

Not at all. The risks and rewards of nuclear power were extremely well know back then, and any objective analysis showed that we should build more of it.

AI is completely different. The risks are not well understood, but are plausibly catastrophic along multiple dimensions. The potential upside is also not well understood.

I remember the optimism of the early internet, when it seemed like it was going to be this incredibly free and liberating realm for everyone to learn and express themselves freely. But now nearly all of that has been reduced or destroyed by the greed of powerful people. The exact same people who are set to control super powerful AI.

Do you really think someone like Elon, who gleefully destroys lives for fun, is going to willingly cede immense amounts of power just to improve the lives of a bunch of normies he'll never meet?! That completely flies in the face of how he and his contemporaries have acted their entire lives, so count me as a little skeptical.

xvxvx• 26 days ago

The best scenario for AI companies is that they replace the human workforce with their bots and make all the money. It’s a sick, amplified version of outsourced labor.

I’ve been rereading Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of The United States’ and the US has been doing this since day zero. Build the economy on indentured servitude. Replace that with slavery. Flood cities with freed slaves when wages get too high. Flood the country with illegals for the same reason. Offshore the work to poor countries. Automate as much as possible. Now AI.

Kudos to the AI leaders for the carefully manicured publicity, claiming this will make everyone free etc., but people see right through it. It’s the never-ending class war between a tiny minority of ultra-wealthy scumbags vs. everyday people one bad day away from being homeless.

Socialism will spread across the US and the battles will continue.

tern4• 26 days ago

Sadly, I think this is true, and it's starting to seem like my own personal political imperative is to remind people that AI can be insanely personally empowering.

Many people around me are just missing the boat, or don't care, but many are also able to finally accomplish all kinds of things they've been barred from in the past.

LLMs are best seen, I think, as an imagination amplifier. If you're in the mindset of finding ways to improve society and help other people, there is no shortage of opportunity, and increasingly, capability.

blululu2• 26 days ago

This could be true, but I think it amounts to wishful thinking. The human empowerment phase of AI is transitory and brief. Once you get into RSI and AGI the human is increasingly left out and disenfranchised. The multiplier of your personal effectiveness directly proportional to how much the AI is doing relative to you. Being 2x more effective is great - AI does half the work. 5x, 10x, 100x? When the AI does 99% of the work you maybe start to worry - the bottleneck to 'your' productivity is now you and you are going up against much faster and more powerful entities than yourself. This mindset is rooted in a short term gain that risks a long term loss.

tern4• 26 days ago

Yes, I agree, but the relevant debate isn't "pro vs anti-AI." That's a fight only one side can win.

The relevant debate is: "human empowerment vs disempowerment".

It's still a long-shot, but at least there's a specific target that a majority may be able to agree on.

(Not saying you were specifically saying either.)

rescripting2• 26 days ago

This is the exact same sentiment I felt at the dawn of the Internet. I felt it was going to empower individuals, tear down borders and barriers, and bring humanity together.

Instead we ended up with an ad fueled dopamine/outrage slot machine.

We're seeing the same thing happen with AI on a condensed timeframe. Yes, its useful. Yes, it lowers barriers and amplifies what individuals can do, just like the early internet did.

However, the same pattern will repeat itself because the exact same forces that bent the arc of the internet towards its current state haven't gone anywhere; if anything they've just become stronger.

tern4• 26 days ago

I don't completely disagree, but that's not the entire story, and the efforts of those who fought for good outcomes matter profoundly.

For instance, we do in fact have global, effectively ad-free, E2E encrypted messaging. A lot of people put in a lot of work on many fronts to design that, prioritize it, and deliver it at world-scale (mostly) legally.

The fact that the ad model became completely dominant is a real tragedy, but I think the deeper mistake with that idea was that "connecting people" is more complicated than it seems and has had many unforeseen consequences.

As a Western well-to-do person, to the extent I can tune out the slot machine, the dream actually has come true in many ways. I have friends and colleagues all over the world, travel is easier, coordination is easier, and politically my voice matters in ways it never would have in the past.

I was reading mailing lists from the early 2000s the other day and it was wild to remember a time when you literally had no idea what was happening in other parts of the world—when nearly all information was mediated through centralized authorities. People were sharing 'suppressed' reports on grass-roots political action other countries with a sense of self-importance that would be cringe today.

martythemaniak• 26 days ago

The problem is not the technology but the size and dominance of the tech sector. Current AI is a promising new technology that can do a lot great stuff, just like the internet and smartphones. But in the 90s the tech sector was tiny, and even in the late 2000s the current behemoths were like 20x smaller than they are today.

Today the tech companies dominate people's lives and attention, everything people do goes through a few companies in one way or another. The google of 2007 was a plucky underdog who promised to Do No Evil. Today they are so huge, the size itself is scary. Instead of being happy you got 2GB free email, you're slightly anxious about accidentally getting flagged by some automated recourse-less system that'll lock you out of your data and disrupt your life significantly. AI startups don't offer a respite, they small but even more scammy and slight-of-hand-y. AI industry marketing is best summed up as "You're a worthless piece of shit NPC and we'll take your job, your personal data and your attention. Buy our shit"

That is to say, people probably understand (on vibe level mostly) that this great new tech will be leveraged to the max by bad rich people to make their lives worse. Nothing innate about the tech dictates this, but it is the way things are turning out. I expect more backlash in the future.

erikschoster• 26 days ago

The backlash is only just getting started, because the technology is only just getting started, too. Britain’s flimsy prime-minister-in-waiting, Andy Burnham, has barely said a word about AI. Even Americans still rank it 29th out of 39 election issues. [..] That is bound to change—and battles over data centres offer a hint of the struggles to come.

Or we'll see through the bullshit (which seems to be happening already) and this will fizzle out.

I have a great face-saving exit plan for AI companies: follow anthropic's lead and pretend you're saving the world by not releasing anything to the public anymore. Then just quietly back away, go bankrupt and let us all eventually forget.

lostmsu• 26 days ago

You can't put the genie in the bottle.

mattas• 26 days ago

Outside of the "this will take your job" messaging, there is simply fatigue around just seeing it _everywhere_. The poor horse has been completely emulsified.

karmakurtisaani• 26 days ago

I have an anecdote I'm dying to share and will be happy to have it buried here!

I was talking to an academic friend of mine who works in a CS theory group in a top university. He told me now only 2 out of 10 members of the group work on theory anymore, the rest are doing applied/industry projects. The ratio used to inverted, but now the theory people are worried AI will replace them, so they look for ways out.

Henchman21• 26 days ago

I mean… sure! You’ve got propaganda on both sides whipping people into a frenzy. Are we pretending today that isn’t happening??

Gud• 26 days ago

The problem is that a majority of the world sustain their living by selling their labour as a commodity, while a small minority control the economy via ownership of capital.

For the owning class of people most of us are the same thing as a bucket of paint, a car or any another commodity.

It doesn't have to be this way, but it is.

kkir• 26 days ago

Reminds me of

First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then you win.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 26 days ago

"Data centres must contend with viral worries over water usage, a confected issue. (Modern ones drink up no more than other industries, and much less in total than America's golf courses.)"

There seems to be an assumption that people care about (a) the amount of water used by data centres and whether data centres use less, the same or more water than other industries, and/or (b) whether data centres use use less water than golf courses

If data centres use less then why would anyone care. They might care not about comparative water across industries but about a particular industry, e..g., "AI" data centres, for some other reason(s). Their opinion on that industry's water use, and any other behaviour, is based on their pre-formed opinion of the industry

For example,

If someone does not play golf, then any amount of water used by golf courses may be offensive. It doesn't matter how this amount compares with other industries

If someone does not use "AI" or does not like using "AI", then any amount of water used by "AI" data centres may be offensive. It doesn't matter how the amount compares to other industries

To counter the "viral worries", there are "viral assurances", a confected resolution

But are these assurances effective in addressing the underlying reality that some people don't use "AI" or dislike using "AI" and may have formed opinions about "AI" based on other criteria

The assurances seem "tone deaf" for lack of a better term

For example, the golf course development industry does not generate press releases and sponsor over-the-top PR that proclaims "everyone will play golf in the future", golf will replace human labor, nor is the golf course industry announcing multi-billion dollar transactions daily, ostensibly defeating candidates in local elections through PAC's, lobbying governments against regulation, etc., etc. (This is only a sample of a list of differences is much longer than the list of similarities. The inordinate amount of attention paid to the "AI" industry in the press, endless hype, is not comparable to the amount of attention paid to the golf course industry nor other comment agriculture industry examples)

The comparisons are nonsensical

The AI backlash is only getting started

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