AI Was Supposed to Make Everything Cheap. Instead, It's Driving Prices Up.
We're Missing a Key Reason Why Americans Hate AI
Americans are furious about the cost of living, and AI is making it worse. For years, Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen promised AI would create abundance and push prices toward zero. But unemployment hasn't spiked and prices keep climbing. The AI buildout is minting billionaires while directly raising costs across the economy—an irony that doesn't require picking a side to see.
AI has not caused mass unemployment in a period of plunging prices. Instead, everybody has a job, and everything is getting more expensive.
- JSR_FDED
I don’t buy the argument. The article claims Americans hate AI because they were promised “lots of cheap stuff” and it hasn’t arrived.
I’ve just never heard this “promise” repeated by any normies. The only thing I hear over and over is “AI will help create medicines to solve all diseases” (or something to that effect). Even then, I don’t get the sense that anyone is expecting that in the short term.
Isn’t the threat of job destruction a much more likely explanation?
- andrewla
I disagree with the premise. The cited survey says:
Thinking now about AI (A-I), that is artificial intelligence …
Q28 In general, would you say… (ROTATE) +
The benefits outweigh the risks of AI ............. 34
The risks outweigh the benefits of AI ............. 57
A little of both (VOL)............................. 2
Not sure .......................................... 7
+ Results shown reflect responses among registered voter
That's all well and good, but the question is very broad.
I think when pushed, the reason people hate AI is that a lot of "AI" solutions have been rolled out before the technology was mature. Even now, for end-user facing things most applications are pretty bad, even as the models have gotten more powerful.
You're increasingly pushed to use AI by every online service, and every interaction with retail pushes AI in your face, and importantly, ALL OF THEM ARE JUST TERRIBLE. Amazon has their shopping assistant which is, astonishingly, WORSE than their regular search, which is a hell of a bar.
But people who use ChatGPT or Claude to answer questions on their own are thrilled with the technology. They'll occasionally laugh at the R's in strawberry, or try to torture the AI (this might be more of a teenager thing) but it is remarkable how well-liked it is, as opposed to Google's search-integrated AI for example.
- kimbernator
I think that the reaction would be wildly different if there were trust that such a technology would be used to make everyone's lives better. If workers were collectively in charge of deciding how AI ought to change their working lives, I suspect most of them would have opted for reduced working hours & longer weekends over what we are currently seeing.
AI could have revolutionized how many people do their work. It could have given so many people the freedom to spend their lives living, but somehow we used it to make work more intense and more taxing than it ever was before. And we all know that with each leap forward, things invariably get worse for us.
- austinthetaco
Yeah this feels totally false. I think most hate it because there is already a lot of upset over financial imbalance, particularly that the gap between average worker and ceo has grown exponentially. It just feels to most a way for a few company ceo's to gain even more wealth while the rest of us don't financially benefit from it (and might be hurt by it by losing their jobs).
- happytoexplain
I think it's more likely to be the obvious and straightforward reasons that people say out loud, constantly, everywhere.