Welcome to AI slopulism

The AI vibes in America are almost definitively rotten.

There was an interesting Pew survey on attitudes towards AI recently. They asked Americans whether the increased use of AI in daily life made them more concerned or more excited, and the responses are telling.

Among 18–29-year-olds, 55% now say they are more concerned than excited about AI. This is up from 31% in 2021.

As for the share of people who say they are more excited than concerned, it has fallen from 25% in 2021 to just 11% today.

So, things aren’t looking good.

And then there is the issue of data centers.

Heatmap has been asking Americans whether they would support the construction of a data center near where they live. And the answers are, again, depressing.

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A year ago, Americans were roughly evenly split. Today, 75% say they would oppose one.

Across political lines, support has basically cratered. Data centers are now 43 points underwater among Republicans, 65 points underwater among independents, and 75 points underwater among Democrats.

One of the tweets that triggered me into voice-writing this post was this one from Théo Jaffee at Google DeepMind, who called this the “anti-data-center psychosis,” which seems like a pretty good encapsulation of the attitudes of a lot of Americans right now.

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But what is also interesting to me is the divergence in attitudes towards AI in the US and elsewhere.

At least among parts of the educated elite in the US, there seems to be a lot of widespread pessimism about AI. And while the data is still noisy, we are perhaps starting to see the initial sparks of things going badly for some people.

Whether the old truism that technological shifts ultimately create more jobs than they destroy holds this time remains to be seen.

Just because it has been true in the past doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be true in the future.

And even the smooth statement that “technological shifts create more jobs than they destroy” ignores all sorts of compositional effects and adjustment issues.

A job can disappear in one industry, in one part of the country, for one kind of worker, while another job gets created years later somewhere else, requiring completely different skills. Both can eventually become part of one reassuring aggregate statistic.

When large parts of the labour force are turned into one aggregate number, we tend to miss the lived realities underneath it.

But anyways.

At the same time, I’ve been reading quite a bit about attitudes towards AI in China, and they seem surprisingly positive.

Bloomberg had an interesting piece on this recently, looking at why AI optimism seems to be so much higher in China than in the US.

Maybe some of this gets exaggerated. Cross-country polling is messy, and there are obvious reasons to be careful about comparing attitudes between China and the US.

But nonetheless, things don’t seem anywhere near as rotten in China as they currently do in America.

And that is very interesting considering Chinese AI labs themselves are making progress at a remarkable pace. It isn’t as if the potentially disruptive technology is happening somewhere else. China is right in the middle of the same technological shift.

The Chinese government also seems, at least from what I’ve been reading, more proactive and sanguine about trying to anticipate the effects of AI and using policy to forestall some of the potential downsides.

So why are Americans so pessimistic about AI?

I don’t have a good answer.

It is actually very hard to suss out what exactly is animating this backlash.

I don’t think this is simply AI populism. It is probably a much sloppier mix of things. AI slopulism, if you will.

The backlash against data centers and AI also feels like it may be a symptom, or an instantiation, of a deeper economic, social, and political malaise rather than something as straightforward as: people heard AI will take their jobs, and now they hate AI.

There are probably a lot of things getting compressed into the word “AI.”

Distrust of Big Tech. Anger at billionaires. Housing. Power prices. Water. Jobs. Economic insecurity. Social media. A generalized feeling that technological change keeps happening to people rather than for them. And probably many other things.

So I want to be careful about monocausal reasoning here.

That being said, I do think one reason for the backlash is the AI companies themselves.

In the initial years of the AI boom, some of the loudest people building these systems spent an extraordinary amount of time shouting and screaming at every opportunity that AI would automate vast swathes of jobs, devastate parts of the middle class, radically reorder society and, at the extreme end, perhaps even become a civilization-ending technology.

And then they kept making the technology better.

Listen to Dario Amodei for three minutes, and it’s hard to come away feeling particularly hopeful about the future of humanity.

If the people building AI keep telling everybody, over and over again, that vast numbers of jobs are going to disappear and that large numbers of people could be economically displaced, why would it be plausible to expect Americans to have a positive view of AI?

In that sense, I think the AI companies have done a phenomenally good job of shooting themselves in the foot and painting themselves as the villains.

Again, I’m not saying the shrill rhetoric from the heads of AI companies is the reason Americans are turning against AI. It isn’t.

But it does feel like a definitive factor.

And all of this feels especially consequential because we seem to be living through an age of extremes, in almost every sense of that phrase, including politics.

My worry is that the extreme reaction that some Americans are developing towards technology, including AI, will lead to first-order and second-order reactions that are very hard to foresee but will nonetheless produce some depressing and perhaps tragic outcomes.

If I put on my sci-fi hat for a second, I don’t think it is outside the realm of possibility that we eventually start seeing violence directed at data centers and other AI infrastructure.

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We have seen versions of this dynamic before with other causes. Protest movements begin with demonstrations and symbolic stunts, and at the fringes, some people escalate.

And in the case of AI, we may already have had a forewarning sign.

In April, a man allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s home and was arrested shortly afterwards while allegedly attempting to break into OpenAI’s headquarters carrying kerosene, a lighter, and an anti-AI manifesto.

I don’t want to overgeneralize from one deeply unusual incident. That would be stupid.

But it does make the tail risk feel a little less like science fiction.

And I don’t really foresee the underlying tensions getting better if AI progress continues at its current pace while public attitudes keep moving in the opposite direction.

To my very untrained and amateurish political eye, it increasingly feels like there is a real constituency in America for some form of anti-technology politics.

What form that eventually takes is hard to know.

But AI already seems well on its way to becoming an election issue, and politicians will inevitably figure out how to package some combination of anxiety about jobs, data centers, Big Tech and economic insecurity and put it on the ballot.

Maybe this all blows over.

Maybe attitudes change dramatically as people use AI more and find it useful.

Maybe the economic gains become widely distributed enough that today’s fears look silly in retrospect.

Or maybe this is the beginning of something much larger.

I don’t know.

This is still a very preliminary and messy observation.

But it is definitely a trend worth watching.