95+% of the companies throwing AI at problems have problems which can't be solved with AI.
even where it helps it's usually just duck tape wrapped around badly implemented IT systems.
That's a small part of it. The largest part of rising costs is mismanagement of the economy, in the past via inflationary debt plus runaway national debt, and the present overspending while kicking the can by borrowing more. The fed has lost control of the economy through rate locks freezing home prices, while inflationary forces drive them higher, and the hyper-consolidation of wealth while minimum wage sits under 10$ an hour. This is ripe for a societal collapse in the next few decades.
AI is funded by the consolidated wealth, ofc, so it dovetails as a scapegoat.
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?
Even accepting it for the sake of argument, I don't think it has failed at all. It has completely revolutionized a handful of fields and is increasingly doing so in others.
Further - it's still very early. Agents have really only begun to take off so far in 2026, and we're still probably 6-12 months from the real uptick in the adoption curve I expect. The first sign of that happening was Manus, followed by the various CUA features of the big players, and more recently: Muse.
As much as I hate to say it, Meta knocked it out of the park with Muse, to the point that just this morning I bought a 60 gallon (shop-sized) air compressor on Marketplace from a middle-aged couple in rural Missouri who used Muse to coordinate pickup. If that's not a sign that consumer adoption is starting to take off, I don't know what is.
I think the will be negative if you push an answer out of them, but it's not something Americans are going out to protest and rallying around. There are a LOT of issues people are passively 60% negative on but it doesn't influence their votes.
…
“Below, for paying subscribers, I’ll explain…”
Not sure how this got to the front page (I have some uncharitable ideas), but I suppose low-to-mid quality writing/copy is the one thing that ai has sent to zero, so that’s convenient now!
I am believing more that with advances in AI and then also robotics the capitalist system as we know it will break. The question is what comes next.
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
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.
I think there's much truth to this.
Personally, the only impacts I have personally witnessed or experienced from these technologies have been, on the whole, negative. I mean, I have seen some upside in fairly niche areas, but they are dwarfed by the downsides. At least so far.
I think a rather large part of the reason (but certainly not the only reason) why this technology is generally viewed in a negative light is because the downsides are actually real and being felt by a very large percentage of people, but the upsides remain mostly in the realm of aspirational statements.
Since ChatGPT's initial release, the S&P 500's combined market cap has grown by about $33 trillion, roughly doubling. Before that, it took 31 years to add the same amount.
Isn't that what we should all care about, making sure capital holders get more capital? As long as BlackRock's assets under management keep growing, we should be happy. Trickle-down economics will definitely trickle down eventually.
(Since Hacker News is unusually tough on sarcasm, I grudgingly have to end this with /s)
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.
There really seems to be no figure in tech that sets a moral example right now. Not enough people in power calling out obvious crypto scams, not enough holding the line against gambling addictions.
I mean probably the most worshipped tech-ish billionaire (trillionaire?) is a perverted man child with a chip on his shoulder that is either a troll who should never be taken seriously (yet is allowed to be CEO of a company with control over ICBMs) or an outright nazi.
It's also good to remember that "revolutionizing" or "disrupting" a thing does not necessarily mean (or imply, outside of SV) that the results will be better.
There is a better explanation.
AI summaries have hit media companies pretty hard. People read the summary instead of visiting the site with the article and looking at the ads. So who hates AI the most? The media companies.
Then they write a lot of hit pieces to turn the public against it (as if that's going to put the genie back in the bottle), which the AI is happy to summarize because it adopts its motivated reasoning from the source material.
I don't think people need to be convinced that "this job-stealing robot that makes trash and accelerates climate destruction faster than the internet was already doing" by hit pieces, plenty of us are just proud Luddites (now if you want to talk about hit pieces, that's a movement that got decimated by bad PR)
What should have been a 15 minute process took 80 and is still not resolved, so I'm trying again today.
christina97•1h ago