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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   24191 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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most members of the public do not understand or care about those uses

This may still be overly optimistic. I think many people's main impression of modern software is negative experiences like ubiquitous data harvesting, addictive social media algorithms, and frustrating experiences with confusing or buggy new technology.

Promising to deliver more of these faster won't be considered a positive effect of AI.

This is kind of where I'm at. Sure, my phone has some cool new toys that let me edit my photos and identify bird calls, but by and large my experience with tech is significantly worse now than it was 10 or 20 years ago. It seems like most recent advances have mostly just ennabled increasing enshittification by making it easier to track me and engage in variable pricing. About 10 years ago, things stopped getting better and just started getting more expensive.

There is real value in the ~10% of my time it saves in researching and drafting emails. But I'd trade that 10% efficiency gain for no more AI ads/scams, no flock cameras, less bot spam, no more people using screenshots of AI hallucinations as evidence for stupid arguments, etc. in a heartbeat. I'm not even convinced AI is worth the price of free, let alone using my tax dollars to build a windowless concrete box in the middle of town.

As far as I can tell, most Americans think that AI is making society worse. More and more Americans have encountered and used the technology, but it is the most widely-despised technological advance in a generation.

For this story I think the key part there is Pew's point 10. Experts are vastly more optimistic about LLMs than the population in general. That divergence is what drives this conflict. If many members of the public believe that the situation is that a small, wealthy elite are forcing a technology on the country that the country does not want... well, those members of the public are correct.

I mean, good? I do not want members of the public to have veto power over what smart engineers are permitted to develop (as long as they're paying for it, of course). Imagine if we'd held a plebiscite on whether universities should continue spending money on this "Internet" thing in friggin' 1973, 4 years after ARPANET began. Imagine if journalists were publishing articles in 1907 asking for the government to shut down research on these new-fangled planes because they're flimsy and dangerous and nobody they know has seen any benefits from them.

Experts have, well, expertise in the subject. They know the technology has a ridiculous number of use cases. But it takes time for it to percolate through society.

This exact mentality has had disastrous effects in economics.

The experts had expertise. They had intelligence, learning, fierce debate about the correct way to organize and run a market economy. Then when their theories turned out to be wrong and their experiments catastrophically failed, received little to no ill consequences. Although you could say they didn't 'fail', as many of them saw great personal benefit.

Huh? How did you and @OliveTapenade both make the same mistake when replying to me? We're not talking about experts running a command economy, which I completely agree has been historically disastrous. The "experts" being quoted aren't government stooges, they're techbros working at the AI companies, who want to be allowed to be capitalists and spend/risk their own money.

The people trying to involve the government - to shut down data center projects - are the other side, the one I'm arguing against.

Imagine if we'd held a plebiscite on whether universities should continue spending money on this "Internet" thing in friggin' 1973

If it helps, if you held this retroactively today, I'm still not sure how I'd personally vote. I get a lot out of the Internet, but I do sometimes wonder if it's worth all the downsides.

That's fair. And the same could be said for AI, of course! There's at least an honest debate to be had there. Not like this highly-motivated special scrutiny of datacenters.

I don't think it would be good to have a social system where 'smart engineers' get to appropriate or make decisions about the use of public resources without the consent of the public who are most affected.

Arpanet or early aeronautics aren't affected by this principle because they didn't involve resources that same way. A university working on computer networks in 1973 was not building giant facilities in small towns against the expressed wishes of those towns' inhabitants.

They're not "appropriating" resources. They're negotiating with authorities to be graciously permitted to pay for them. Water, electricity, chips, land, buildings, employees. None of these are free.

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