Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

Paul Krugman: “First, we fear that AI will do terrible things because the companies selling it told us it would do terrible things. Last year, for example, Anthropic CEO Darius Amodei declared in an interview with Axios that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs and drive overall unemployment as high as 20 percent within 1 to 5 years.”

“More recently Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have tried to walk back their predictions of a ‘jobs apocalypse’. But why were they so willing to promote apocalyptic visions in the first place? The answer is money. They pushed the idea that they had a technology that would quickly and utterly transform the economy partly to dazzle Wall Street and secure financing, and partly to scare businesses into rushing into AI adoption for fear of being left behind.”

“Only belatedly did they realize that declaring that your technology will wreak devastation would lead to a public backlash, and that this backlash would be a serious problem..”

“Second, many ordinary people view AI negatively because they feel that it is being forced on them.”