Thank you for reading Contra. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber for just $5 a month, as this is a completely reader-supported newsletter.
Every now and then, sparks of self-awareness illuminate things for tech people that are fairly obvious to most others. Matt Palmer, one such person and a self-described “friend of the future,” wrote:
I think Palmer meant well, and this sentiment is aiming in the right direction, but still missing the mark. At least Palmer, unlike so many of his peers, is aware that there is a problem and that it should be taken seriously, rather than met with derision or aloofness. But “Middle America,” which really just means everyone outside the Silicon Valley psychosphere, isn’t starting to hate; it arrived at hate a long time ago and has settled into a persistent rage. Nor is it “self-defeating and irrational” for them to feel that way. The people in question are angry precisely because they’ve been paying attention, and what they’ve heard is that the future will be mostly good for the tech industry and mostly bad for everyone else. Call it untrue, call it unfair, call it whatever you want, but the fault lies with the messengers, not the people listening.
Just recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview with POLITICO that he believes “the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of [artificial intelligence] and people having the agency.” By “the world,” he is presumably referring to everyone who doesn’t have the means to protect themselves, like, for example, one of those high-security properties in New Zealand owned by Peter Thiel, where Altman has previously speculated he might go hunker down in the event of “bad things happening.” The message has been received, loud and clear, and it came through with all the warmth and compassion of Lord Farquaad declaring: “Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make.”
It is rational for ordinary people to be angry about being asked to accept risks that the Altmans and Thiels of the world won’t themselves. Even worse is when these people proclaim that your risk is their reward. Last year, Marc Andreessen said on a podcast that one of the few jobs likely to survive the rising tide of automation driven by AI is his own, which he humbly described as “timeless.”
“So, it is possible—I don’t want to be definitive—but it’s possible that that is quite literally timeless,” he said about the role of the venture capitalist. “And when, you know, when the AI is doing everything else, that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing.”
Rest assured that whatever happens to you, your community, or your country, Marc Andreessen will be good.
A few months later, he picked a fight with Pope Leo XIV after the pontiff called on the world to remember the “ethical and spiritual weight” of technological innovation, “for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity.” An eminently reasonable statement that provoked mockery from Andreessen, who was subsequently blasted so hard by backlash that he deleted several posts. But the mask had slipped, confirming suspicions that something is deeply wrong with the people running the industry. The funny thing is that they can’t help themselves. They can’t stop saying and doing things like this, as much as they should probably try. But that’s what happens when you live in iron-clad echo chambers. You forget how strange and outright horrific your views are to people outside of them.
The hype of this technology has been eclipsed by the lack of returns that meaningfully improve the lives of the average person, and this has translated into increasingly glum public sentiment. A Pew Research Center poll conducted in June found that 52 percent of Americans “say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life.” That’s up from 37 percent in 2021; just 9 percent are more excited than concerned. Notably, that sentiment continues to climb for adults under 30, who still have most of their working years ahead of them. When these people hear the word “innovation” used in the context of AI, what comes to mind, right now, is employers using it as a reason to conduct layoffs, rising healthcare premiums, surging utility bills, and more addictive gambling apps. One of the more discomforting pictures is of the internet as a place flooded by slop created by generative AI that is, in turn, mined and analyzed by AI agents employed by humans seeking to create viral content in an ouroboros of cognitive oblivion that benefits few outside of crypto scammers, making folktales about sprites inducing hallucinations to lure people to their deaths seem worth revisiting.
Certainly, this is a deeply pessimistic view, but that’s just how many people feel about it after first being promised that AI would liberate them from tedium, that it would work with rather than against them, and then being told it would likely liberate them from their jobs and maybe more. In their minds, and with good reason, skepticism or even outright opposition to AI isn’t self-defeating but an act of self-preservation, and there is nothing more rational than that.