N and I had a long conversation about AI the other day and I genuinely haven’t stopped thinking about it. Normally, even when people in the US are not sure about a new technology at first, we eventually buy into it because it gets framed as “progress” in a capitalist sense. Like, okay, this will make things more efficient, create wealth, improve lives, whatever. That pitch usually works.
But the people evangelizing a total AI takeover seem so insulated from the reality of how most people actually live that I don’t think they fully understand why the backlash has been so intense. Or maybe they understand and just don’t care. Either way, they seem completely disconnected from the fact that this country is built on the Calvinist idea that work is tied to morality. We’ve spent generations absorbing the belief that working hard is inherently virtuous, that your job is tied to your worth, and that needing help or not being “productive” is a personal failure.
So because the AI pitch has been and remains a very wealthy man gleefully declaring that AI is “a machine will permanently replace your livelihood and identity,” and then…that’s the end of the conversation? Of course people are reacting badly to that.
Too much of American identity is wrapped up in what we do. Who are you is almost always answered with what do you do for work. And I actually think part of that is because we don’t have a deeply ingrained class identity the way a lot of other countries do. Work is the thing that defines people socially, morally, and personally.
Like, people here won’t even stop working when they’re sick, grieving, burned out, or actively falling apart, partly because our worker protections and social safety nets are terrible, but also because we’ve culturally internalized the idea that stopping means failure.
Meanwhile the AI people are basically standing there going, “Why are you resisting this? Why won’t you just let this happen to you?” in a really creepy way.
Well, Sam, because you can't leave swathes of people with no avenue to make money in a capitalist society. The cash cannon that consumers blast directly into the mouths of these people will also stop if people just don't....have money to buy things anymore.
There's too many things that human beings are too good at that a bot simply cannot replace, and should not replace, and I think we're all just tired of being told we're not going to have any money and literally everything is going to be worse than it already is.
I can also say, from handling dozens and dozens of implementation projects, that the way most companies are approaching AI right now feels almost identical to the blockchain frenzy a few years ago. Some CEO or executive hears about a trend, gets excited about the concept of it, and suddenly decides to restructure workflows, departments, or entire company strategies without actually understanding how the organization functions day to day or what implementation really requires. Then, before the dust even settles, they’ve already moved on to the next shiny thing.
And the reality is that initiatives like that are incredibly hard to implement successfully, because at the end of the day people tend to stick with the systems and processes that have worked for them for years. You can mandate a new tool from the top down, but if it doesn’t meaningfully fit into existing workflows, solve an actual problem, or account for how people really do their jobs, most employees are either going to quietly work around it or revert back to what they know because while you made the thing live, what you didn't do was get the buy in from users through an actual change management process.
The gap between the theoretical and the practical is just too big to cross right now, and knowing the technical literacy of the average person is...frankly not great given some of the support calls I've had to field over the years, it's evident that this is exactly what's happening in certain sectors that have tried to implement a wide AI toolbox without actually knowing what it is they're trying to solve. If the refrain is, over and over, use it or get left behind, then you're just wasting money to keep up with the corporate Joneses.
Anyway, I think we're going to keep seeing this backlash intensify, especially around the insistence we need these data centers that create minimal jobs and suck up tons of resources to the cost of constituents instead of these companies, and I'll be curious to see how it plays out.
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