When Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google, started talking about artificial intelligence during a commencement speech at the University of Arizona on Friday, the graduates erupted in boos. \u201cA.I. is going to touch everything,\u201d said Schmidt, as his stadium-sized audience roared its disapproval. \u201cWhatever path you choose, A.I. will become part of how work is done.\u201d Maybe he meant this as a promise of opportunity, but the students seemed to hear it as a threat \u2014 or a curse.<\/p>\n
Something similar happened at the University of Central Florida a week earlier, when the real estate executive Gloria Caulfield described A.I.<\/a> as \u201cthe next Industrial Revolution.\u201d Listeners booed, and someone shouted, \u201cA.I. sucks!\u201d Caulfield appeared to be caught off guard, but she shouldn\u2019t have been, because evidence of a ferocious backlash against A.I., especially among young people, is everywhere.<\/p>\n One recent report<\/a> found that only 18 percent of Gen Z-ers feel hopeful about A.I., and almost half say the risks outweigh the benefits. Politicians with followings among young people \u2014 including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the left and James Fishback on the right \u2014 are calling for moratoriums on data centers. A.I. is increasingly a pop culture villain. \u201cThe people who make this stuff are losers,\u201d said<\/a> the comedian Hannah Einbinder, star of HBO\u2019s \u201cHacks,\u201d a show that has put hatred of the technology at the center of its current season. There have even been some high-profile acts of anti-A.I. violence, including a Molotov cocktail hurled at the home of OpenAI\u2019s chief, Sam Altman.<\/p>\n As Americans rebel against A.I., the industry\u2019s oligarchic leaders are responding by trying to buy even more political influence, pouring money into super PACs and lobbying. Groups supporting A.I. and crypto, Politico reported<\/a> this month, \u201care already becoming the most dominant players on the political battlefield, spending heavily for candidates on both sides of the aisle and in some cases rivaling the fund-raising of long-established party groups.\u201d The irony is that the industry\u2019s attempts to game the democratic system are a big part of its deep unpopularity.<\/p>\n One reason Americans seem to despise A.I. more than people in other countries is that they know our government is too sclerotic to handle it. Researchers at Stanford University found that out of people in 30 countries, Americans had the least faith in their leaders\u2019 ability to regulate A.I. Internationally, people tend to feel more positively about A.I. when the state tries to ensure that it benefits them.<\/p>\n In a recent article<\/a>, Bharat Ramamurti, a deputy director of President Joe Biden\u2019s National Economic Council, described how Japan uses public funding and regulatory policy to encourage companies to use A.I. to complement work by humans rather than replace it. In the Nordic countries, workers often have a formal role in deciding how A.I. will be deployed and can use acceptance of it as a bargaining chip. As a result, there have been \u201cplenty of technological advancements, including on A.I.,\u201d he told me. (Just last month, Norway introduced self-driving buses on public roads.)<\/p>\n By contrast, in the United States, where neither the government nor corporations feel the need to do much for those made redundant by A.I., the spread of the technology amplifies an already chronic feeling of precarity. Companies are citing A.I. as the reason for mass layoffs; according to the Alliance for Secure A.I., there have been almost 120,000<\/a> A.I.-linked job losses<\/a> in the United States just since last year. Recent college graduates are facing a brutal job market as entry-level positions disappear and A.I. renders the application process inhumanly opaque. During the dot-com boom, tech companies often seemed as if they were leading an arms race to offer new benefits to workers. Now, as Axios reported<\/a>, firms are rescinding benefits to fund A.I. expansion.<\/p>\n We simply lack the political infrastructure in America to distribute A.I.\u2019s benefits to the public. With the systematic evisceration of the labor movement that started during Ronald Reagan\u2019s presidency, said Ramamurti, \u201cthe institutions that many other countries have for mediating these kinds of technological advances don\u2019t exist in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, it\u2019s not only in the workplace that many people feel exploited by A.I. Grocery stores are using shoppers\u2019 personal data to set<\/a> pricing. Health insurance companies are employing it to decide what treatments get covered. As MarketWatch reported<\/a>, a Medicare pilot program using A.I. for prior authorizations resulted in \u201csome patients waiting weeks longer to get medical procedures \u2014 if they receive care at all.\u201d For many people, A.I. feels extractive, not additive.<\/p>\n It\u2019s telling that the generation most exposed to A.I. appears to like it the least. A New York Times poll<\/a> released on Monday shows that 47 percent of voters under 30 rate A.I. as \u201cmostly bad,\u201d the highest percentage in any age bracket.<\/p>\n A.I. executives, buffered by their colossal fortunes and resulting political connections, don\u2019t seem to feel much pressure to win people over. Instead, the industry\u2019s message is coercive and bullying: adopt our product on our terms or be forever left behind. Tech billionaires might be less likely to announce that their inventions will cause mass unemployment if they felt constrained by public sentiment. The fact that they don\u2019t shows how broken America\u2019s democratic feedback loop has become.<\/p>\n