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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29144 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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This is where it gets interesting. I don't interact with a lot of engineers in my daily life outside of work. Most of my social group is blue collar (service industry, trades, retail), college faculty and staff, or retirees (musical connections). Someone has brought it up in every social interaction I've had in the last 24 hours, and in every case, the general sentiment was that it was a shame the guy didn't have better aim.

This is crazy to me — I’m pretty sure most of the people around me couldn’t name Altman even if asked. People use ChatGPT, sometimes Gemini, sometimes Claude, no one thinks this is going to lead to “AGI” (a term they’re unfamiliar with), and in general ai chat is viewed as very helpful and often better than a google search, ai art is viewed mildly skeptically mostly for “can we believe photo evidence now?” reasons rather than “we must save the poor artists from the horrific slop!” reasons, and most people probably couldn’t name a single major executive involved in AI.

I’m sure the blue tribers around here are angry in these ways, but the “these evil tech billionaires are destroying society!” isn’t something I hear often irl. There’s been a lot of discussion about the Iran war and some about the Epstein files, but AI doomerism or boosterism just… isn’t a thing. It’s a technology people use, no one expects it to radically reshape the world or end it, just disrupt things a bit in the same way the smartphone did.

I guess a lot of people really don’t like AI, but my family and friends, a very small sample size, like it and use the chat models a lot for everyday tasks. I guess there’s going to be some job disruption, but I suspect that’s more because executives believe AI can do more than it actually can. It’s a tool that’s useful as an adjunct to human judgment, and I wouldn’t trust this generation of AI with truly autonomous operation of any real sort.

my family and friends, a very small sample size, like it and use the chat models a lot for everyday tasks

It would be funny if the BIG DISRUPTIVE TECH THAT WILL USHER IN THE SINGULARITY ends up being a less annoying version of Clippy or more useful version of Siri that is majority used by ordinary people for trip planning, recipes, and as the modern version of a pen-pal.

Frankly to me this has always seemed like the most likely outcome by orders of magnitude.

My experience with normies, mostly co-workers, is that there's mild awareness of AI, but mostly in a "oh no, are management going to make us learn this as well?" kind of way. It sounds like yet another annoying thing that management might require everybody to learn and use, when we'd really all prefer to just get on with our jobs.

Managers themselves are interested in it and moderately enthusiastic - the most recent pitch has been for an AI tool that's supposed to listen to conversations and then accurately transcribe them, thus improving accountability and documentation - but that enthusiasm is not mirrored on the ground at all.

Absolutely nobody knows who Sam Altman is, or what 'AGI' stands for. Nobody.

My impression overall is not that people are dogmatically anti-AI, or have some strong ideological stand against it. It's just another instance of stupid computer bullshit that the bosses are going to try to make us deal with. Nobody likes it, but nobody likes any of the digital systems that get promoted from above. It's just plain old more of the same.

Absolutely nobody knows who Sam Altman is

Nobody knows who Sam Altman is, but "AI CEO who's stealing all the water" has filtered all the way down to my rod and gun club.

that's supposed to listen to conversations and then accurately transcribe them, thus improving accountability and documentation

It would need to get way better than the current AI models on Youtube videos, which routinely misspell and misuse words because they can't extrapolate from context and are just going by the sound of the word.

When I see "Sam Altman", I always think of Mahasamatman from Zelazny's Lord of Light.

Where do you draw the line between "normie" and "nerd" or whatever else?

I suppose the implicit heuristic I'm using is something like "knows how to use a computer". I'm thinking of co-workers who do fine with the systems they've been taught but the moment the computer does something they didn't expect, they call for IT or ask me.

The descriptions he gave combine to code for a deeply blue (except for the tradies) and often very online/news-addicted circle. I hear that stuff from that sort of people all the time now - it only started a couple months ago for the most part, but it's already getting fanatical.

The tradies have a pretty big punk subculture that also lean left. That was the group I saw last night.

@OliveTapanade is right though - they just know an "AI CEO" was involved - not Altman specifically.

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