Nilay Patel, in a terrific essay (and Decoder one-sider) at The Verge:
In fact, the polling on this is so strong, I think it’s fair to
say that a lot of people hate AI, and that Gen Z in particular
seems to hate AI more and more as they encounter it. There’s
that NBC News poll showing AI with worse favorability than
ICE and only a little bit above the war in Iran and the
Democrats generally. That’s with nearly two thirds of respondents
saying they used ChatGPT or Copilot in the last month. Quinnipiac
just found that over half of Americans think AI will do more harm
than good, while more than 80 percent of people were either
very concerned or somewhat concerned about the technology. Only 35
percent of people were excited about it.Poll after poll shows that Gen Z uses AI the most and has the most
negative feelings about it. A recent Gallup poll found that
only 18 percent of Gen Z was hopeful about AI, down from an
already-bad 27 percent last year. At the same time, anger is
growing: 31 percent of those Gen Z respondents said they feel
angry about AI, up from 22 percent last year.
A good friend texted me a few weeks ago that “the phrase ‘software is eating the world’ sure hits differently now” than when Marc Andreessen coined the term back in 2011. (Patel, in fact, references Andreessen’s seminal essay.) That same friend texted me a link to this piece by Patel this morning.
Something is profoundly off in the computer industry when it comes to software broadly and AI specifically. It’s up for debate what exactly is off and what should be done about it, but the undeniable proof that something is profoundly off is the deep unpopularity surrounding everything related to AI. You can’t argue that the public always turns against groundbreaking technology. The last two epoch-defining shifts in technology were the smartphone in the 2000s, and the Internet/web in the 1990s. Neither of those moments generated this sort of mainstream popular backlash. I’d say in both of those cases, regular people were optimistically curious. The single most distinctive thing about “AI” today is the vociferous public opposition to it and deeply pessimistic expectations about what it’s going to do.
You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own
experiences. This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech
people with software brains see the world and how regular people
are living their lives.So what is software brain? The simplest definition I’ve come up
with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of
databases that can be controlled with the structured language of
software code. Like I said, this is a powerful way of seeing
things. So much of our lives run through databases, and a bunch of
important companies have been built around maintaining those
databases and providing access to them.Zillow is a database of houses. Uber is a database of cars and
riders. YouTube is a database of videos. The Verge’s website is a
database of stories. You can go on and on and on. Once you start
seeing the world as a bunch of databases, it’s a small jump to
feeling like you can control everything if you can just control
the data.But that doesn’t always work.
“Software brain” is a good term — a tidy two-word encapsulation of a sprawling worldview that is currently very much in vogue. Take some time to read Patel’s whole piece carefully. It feels important, and it’s really well considered.
