{"id":457445,"date":"2026-05-19T23:36:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T23:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/457445\/"},"modified":"2026-05-19T23:36:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T23:36:10","slug":"ai-sucks-campus-backlash-in-us-signals-rising-scepticism-towards-big-tech-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/457445\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018AI sucks!\u2019: Campus backlash in US signals rising scepticism towards big tech \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Eric Schmidt, former chief executive of Google<\/a>, started talking about artificial intelligence<\/a> (AI) during a commencement speech at the University of Arizona on Friday, the graduates erupted in boos. <\/p>\n

\u201cAI is going to touch everything,\u201d said Schmidt, as his stadium-sized audience roared its disapproval. \u201cWhatever path you choose, AI 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 \u2013 or a curse.<\/p>\n

Something similar happened at the University of Central Florida a week earlier, when real estate executive Gloria Caulfield described AI as \u201cthe next industrial revolution\u201d. Listeners booed, and someone shouted: \u201cAI sucks!\u201d Caulfield appeared to be caught off-guard, but she shouldn\u2019t have been, because evidence of a ferocious backlash against AI, especially among young people, is everywhere.<\/p>\n

One recent report found only 18 per cent of Gen Zers feel hopeful about AI, and almost half say the risks outweigh the benefits. Politicians with followings among young people \u2013 including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, on the left and Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback on the right \u2013 are calling for moratoriums on data centres. AI is increasingly a pop culture villain. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe people who make this stuff are losers,\u201d said comedian Hannah Einbinder, star of HBO\u2019s Hacks, a show that has put hatred of the technology at the centre of its current season. There have even been some high-profile acts of anti-AI violence, including a Molotov cocktail hurled at the home of OpenAI\u2019s chief, Sam Altman.<\/p>\n

As Americans rebel against AI, the industry\u2019s oligarchic leaders are responding by trying to buy even more political influence, pouring money into super political action committees and lobbying. Groups supporting AI and crypto, Politico reported 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 rivalling the fundraising 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 AI more than people in other countries is that they know their 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 AI. Internationally, people tend to feel more positively about AI when the state tries to ensure that it benefits them.<\/p>\n

In a recent article, Bharat Ramamurti, former deputy director of then president Joe Biden\u2019s National Economic Council, described how Japan uses public funding and regulatory policy to encourage companies to use AI to complement work by humans rather than replace it. In the Nordic countries, workers often have a formal role in deciding how AI 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 AI,\u201d he told me. (Just last month, Norway introduced self-driving buses on public roads.)<\/p>\n

\"AA protest on artificial intelligence outside a courthouse where Elon Musk\u2019s lawsuit against OpenAI was heard. Photograph: Jason Henry\/The New York Times<\/p>\n

By contrast, in the US, where neither the government nor corporations feel the need to do much for those made redundant by AI, the spread of the technology amplifies an already chronic feeling of precarity. <\/p>\n

Companies are citing AI as the reason for mass lay-offs; according to the Alliance for Secure AI, there have been almost 120,000 AI-linked job losses in the United States just since last year. Recent college graduates are facing a brutal job market as entry-level positions disappear and AI 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, firms are rescinding benefits to fund AI expansion.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Will the AI \u2018jobs apocalypse\u2019 cloud have a silver lining?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The United States simply lacks the political infrastructure to distribute AI\u2019s benefits to the public. With the systematic evisceration of the labour 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 AI. Grocery stores are using shoppers\u2019 personal data to set pricing. Health insurance companies are employing it to decide what treatments get covered. As MarketWatch reported, a Medicare pilot programme using AI for prior authorisations resulted in \u201csome patients waiting weeks longer to get medical procedures \u2013 if they receive care at all\u201d. For many people, AI feels extractive, not additive.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s telling that the generation most exposed to AI appears to like it the least. A New York Times poll released last Monday shows 47 per cent of voters under 30 rate AI as \u201cmostly bad\u201d the highest percentage in any age bracket.<\/p>\n

AI 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 the democratic feedback loop in the United States has become.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Meta workers are bracing for another round of job cuts. We should all be nervousOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Schmidt, of all people, should understand why many are repelled by this increasingly intrusive technology. Last year, he was a writer of a New York Times opinion essay about how many in the United States \u201csee AI as a nuisance in their daily lives,\u201d even as it\u2019s become more of a useful consumer tool in China. \u201cIt\u2019s paramount that more people outside Silicon Valley feel the beneficial impact of AI,\u201d he wrote. <\/p>\n

That can be accomplished only by political action, not hectoring. \u201cFind a way to say yes,\u201d Schmidt told the graduates in Arizona. Their boos were their answer: No.<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared in The New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Eric Schmidt, former chief executive of Google, started talking about artificial intelligence (AI) during a commencement speech…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":457446,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,1711,61,60,1682,80,90],"class_list":["post-457445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-google","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-openai","tag-technology","tag-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457445\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/457446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}