Just as importantly: we have to stop amplifying tech bosses’ chosen narratives about their products’ destructive potential, because this helps them raise more money and do more terrible things. Bernie Sanders needs to stop insisting that the US government should own 50% of the money-losingest corporations the world has ever seen and start talking about how they will not get a government bailout when their investment bubble bursts.
The public furor over it does have to do with technology. The consumers don’t know that they already trust and have been using AI so much everywhere. Autocomplete was once considered AI. Same goes for image search, voice recognition/dictation, spam filtering, search results, map navigation, etc. Do they even know their daily doom scroll feeds are based on the field of AI. Where’s the anger about all that stuff?? AI is and has been everywhere. I don’t see people trying to burn down Google image search or their Netflix feed. People just don’t know they’ve been immersed in it on a daily basis for far longer than LLMs.
It’s a matter of relative perspective but if you showed someone from about pre-2000 the kind of AI/ML stuff we have now, they’d be mind blown. It wasn’t even that long ago that object recognition was considered one of the major hurdles in the field. Right now that is unimpressive technology such that nobody even considers it AI anymore.
Right now the goal post is at, why can’t I command it produce an end product like a Star Trek computer. Has anyone stopped to think at how far the field has come. It’s not about what it can’t do, nobody thinks about what it can in any other way than unimpressive.
There’s not only a disconnect in economic, but also technological perspective. Both need a correction.