Americans do not care for artificial intelligence. Recent polling shows that their attitudes mostly range from ambivalence to horror. Some observers have suggested that opposition to AI is due to poor PR from industry leaders. If tech titans hadn’t been so convinced that boasting of their apocalyptic powers was the best way to raise capital, the argument goes, then the American public would be on board. Chinese public opinion, for instance, is considerably more favorable.
But these discrepancies can be read another way. The taste for liberty is not independent of culture and history. China has not known freedom for some time, but citizens of the United States have a long experience of it. It is a testament to Americans’ retention of the spirit of liberty that they mistrust AI so much. The various gripes against AI are manifestations of a largely inarticulate intuition that its widespread adoption cannot be reconciled with a free society. Americans are groping toward the realization that, even if AI does not end life on earth, it will destroy our way of life.
In order to make the case against AI, one need only quote the industry’s leaders. They have foretold the creation of a “permanent underclass” once AI agents (imminently, they think) surpass us in all cognitive capacities, and have long warned that misaligned AI could even lead to the extinction of humanity. This is a far cry from anything America has seen before from its captains of industry. Andrew Carnegie never promised to bring on the apocalypse. While industry leaders have softened their rhetoric of late, now disavowing the goal of complete human economic obsolescence, the major AI corporations remain officially committed to the development of artificial general intelligence, defined as an AI system that “outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.” Already, AI is outpacing what humans can do in many research areas, and AI-generated text and music are overwhelming the digital landscape.
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