I love AI. Why doesn’t everyone?

This nuanced, optimistic take -> I love AI. Why doesn’t everyone? by Noah Smith

Fast forward a few decades, and I actually have that little robot friend I always dreamed of. It’s not exactly like any of the AI portrayals from sci-fi, but it’s recognizably similar. As I go through my daily life, GPT (or Gemini, or Claude) is always there to help me. If my water filter needs to be replaced, I can ask my robot friend how to do it. If I forget which sociologist claimed that economic growth creates the institutional momentum for further growth, I can ask my robot friend who that was. If I want to know some iconic Paris selfie spots, it can tell me. If I can’t remember the article I read about China’s innovation ecosystem last year, my robot buddy can find it for me.

It can proofread my blog posts, be my search engine, help me decorate my room, translate other languages for me, teach me math, explain tax documents, and so on. This is just the beginning of what AI can do, of course. It’s possibly the most general-purpose technology ever invented, since its basic function is to memorize the entire corpus of human knowledge and then spit any piece of it back to you on command. And because it’s programmed to do everything with a smile, it’s always friendly and cheerful — just like a little robot friend ought to be.

No, AI doesn’t always get everything right. It makes mistakes fairly regularly. But I never expected engineers to be able to create some kind of infallible god-oracle that knows every truth in the Universe. C-3PO gets stuff confidently wrong all the time, as does the computer on Star Trek. For that matter, so does my dad. So does every human being I’ve ever met, and every news website I’ve ever read, and every social media account I’ve ever followed. Just like with every other source of information and assistance you’ve ever encountered in your life, AI needs to be cross-checked before you can believe 100% in whatever it tells you. Infallible omniscience is still beyond the reach of modern engineering.

Who cares? This is an amazingly useful technology, and I love using it. It has opened my informational horizons by almost as much as the internet itself, and made my life far more convenient. Even without the expected impacts on productivity, innovation, and so on, just having this little robot friend would be enough for me to say that AI has improved my life enormously.

This instinctive, automatic reaction to such a magical new tool seems utterly natural to me. And yet when I say this on social media, people pop out of the woodwork to denounce AI and ridicule anyone who likes it.

This post completely resonates with my experience.

I live in social circles where generative AI has become this really weird uncool, tribal faux pas where it has been deemed uniformly “bad” and unacceptable.

I’m 40 now – and, like the author of this piece, I find the antagonism against AI odd, not so much because of AI per se, but because we’ve gone through so many disruptive technologies…with the exact same adoption fight. Sometime I’m like – “ya’ll know we’ve seen this movie before, right?”

In my short lifetime, I’ve been confidently told by smart, savvy, well-informed people that…

• No one should use the Internet for academic research
• Good handwriting is a skill to last a lifetime
• No one will want to read the news on the Internet
• Smartphones are a generally pointless purchase
• Ecommerce is a niche fad
• Banking online is dangerous
• Ride hailing apps are evil and unsafe
• Facebook is the dumbest thing ever
• There’s no way to replicate TV on the Internet
• Solar power is too expensive to be worthwhile
• You really need to know how to drive a stick shift car
• Battery powered bikes are too expensive and too heavy
• Drones are a toy
• Satellite maps are too expensive and they grossly violate privacy
• Tablets are just big phones that no one needs
• Electric cars will never have enough range
• No one will pay for streaming services when cable exists
• Working from home is unproductive and will never catch on
• Voice assistants are creepy and useless
• QR codes are dead and pointless
• Podcasts too complicated to be mainstream
• Smartwatches are the most unnecessary gadget ever made
• AI is decades away from being remotely useful
• No serious business will use cloud storage
• Nobody will pay money to watch other people play video games
• Newspapers are essential and will never disappear
• Gene editing is science fiction
• Wind power will never be economically viable
• People won’t trust doctors they can’t see in person
• 3D printing is just for prototypes
• College courses online? That’s not real education
• Commercial space industry is a pipe dream
• Robots will never replace factory workers
• Video calls will always be expensive and require special equipment
• Digital cameras will never match film quality
• LED bulbs are too expensive and the light is terrible
• Self-checkout lanes will never work – people will just steal
• Remote surgery is impossible and dangerous
• DNA testing should only be done in specialized labs
• etc., etc.

And this is just the stuff that I experienced and remember discussing with people who had very firm opinions, lots of data, and good arguments. And yes, a lot of these changes have had bad consequences. But, all of them have had incredibly good consequences. In fact, that’s the reason they are still around!

But it’s ok to say, “yes, I want to mitigate the negative effects of this massive change, but also, this technology is really freaking cool.”

My takeaway is *not* that these changes were “good” or “bad”, but that they created a whole world of positive, negative, and neutral consequences.

And on every, single change – we all, as individuals and as a society, never went back on a technological change. We just did our best to keep the good, ditch the bad, and understand the neutral.