AI backlash is growing, but how much is just hype?

A week ago, I had never heard of Matt Shumer. Today, I and 80 million others have viewed his “Something Big is Happening” essay warning about the all-conquering power of the AI revolution, counselling us to maximise our use of artificial intelligence immediately and to put our finances in order. The message? A technology as flexible and powerful as AI will leave many people’s careers permanently devastated. For the truly paranoid, Citrini Research’s 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis report this week vividly describes an apocalyptic scenario. As the American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis commented in Vox, “the folks already super-worried about AI are now super-worrying even harder”. AI angst has hit the mainstream, with the hubris of many US tech titans set against a backlash – Stanford University’s Marietje Schaake calls it a “botlash” – from a remarkably diverse community of alarm. As Schaake wrote in the Financial Times this week: “Across the US, grass-roots movements are forming to protest against various excesses and the effects of the technology, from parents furious about the harms done to children with chatbot companions to communities attempting to block data centres and objecting to company contracts with government agencies.” Shumer’s essay comes not from the consumers of AI but its producers – within the “deep-geek” AI and coding community, where recent innovations have seen AI code-writers being superseded by AI agents: algorithms writing algorithms. Views on Shumer’s essay range from dismissing it as a masterpiece of hype to a description of the obvious. Something big is happening but there is wide disagreement over the balance of good vs harm and our capacity to contain the dangers. There is consensus that we have faced many historically transformative moments before and adapted – but that this particular transformation is without precedent. While Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei celebrates AI agents as “a country of geniuses in a data centre”, he is distinctive among the Silicon Valley tech-bro community in sounding caution, in particular in his recent essay, “The Adolescence of Technology”: “Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.” The great majority of humankind still live in a largely analogue world, where the impact of AI remains largely superficial and it is mainly we humans spanning the gap between the digital and the real world. As Microsoft’s latest AI Diffusion Report revealed, AI tools have reached only 16.3 per cent of the world’s population (even in the United States, it is just 28 per cent). And we are still mainly very primitive users; research shows 77 per cent of ChatGPT users relied on it for just three things: practical guidance, seeking information and writing. There is unquestionably hyperventilation in the angst-driven storm that has erupted since Shumer’s essay. And as Harvard’s Paulo Carvao argued in Forbes magazine, there is a significant oversimplification of a complex transition. But the latest botlash is built on serious foundations. Few, even in the tech world, recognised until recently the scale of demand data centres would put on basic infrastructure. Their demand for power and water is putting serious strain on many communities across the US and generating political controversy. The financial cost has aroused alarm. Last year, more than half of venture capital worldwide was estimated to have gone into AI companies, and mostly in the US. A Financial Times report from Missouri, where a district ban has been imposed on new data centre construction, noted that “across the US, citizens, clergy and elected officials in conservative communities are leading a grass-roots rebellion against the rapid roll-out” of AI. Missouri state representative Colin Wellenkamp said voters’ three top concerns were about what AI does to their water and air, what is being done to keep people safe from AI risks, and whether AI will take their job. Job fears, a major driver of the botlash, were a core concern of both Shumer and the Citrini report. The latter went apocalyptically on from job (and income) losses to exploring the potential for a collapse in consumption, and the likely catastrophic implications for the equity markets. “The AI bubble is popping. Large-scale bankruptcies are coming. But the real crisis isn’t the bubble bursting, it’s what happens after,” warns University College London professor Steven Keen. “When it’s cheaper to buy a robot and pay electricity than hire a worker and pay wages, those jobs disappear permanently.” More sanguine voices do not dispute that the AI revolution is approaching, but that its approach will take longer than many assume. For example, while AI has been able to invent new drugs with astonishing speed, clinical trials and regulatory approval can take decades. Pethokoukis reminded that “basic bottlenecks and constraints” will slow down AI adoption: “Deploying [AI] across large, regulated, risk-averse institutions demands heavy complementary investment in data infrastructure, process redesign, compliance frameworks and worker retraining. [...] The slowest sector sets the speed limit.” So Shumer is right to remind us that something big is happening, and that we need rapidly to adapt, but perhaps the last thought stays with US lawyer and AI adviser Ralph Losey: “[AI-acceleration] narratives travel at superfast computer speeds. Wisdom still travels at human speed.” Such acceleration is real, but this just increases the need for adult supervision. “It does not eliminate the human role,” he said. “It intensifies it. Just as it always has.”

AI backlash is growing, but how much is just hype?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Job fears, environmental strain and security threats are fuelling the botlash, yet experts remain divided over its net impact – and our ability to contain the risks

Job fears, environmental strain and security threats are fuelling the botlash, yet experts remain divided over its net impact – and our ability to contain the risks