57% of Americans think AI is bad for society, 66% oppose new data centers, and Silicon Valley’s response is to build more data centers so AI can explain why the public is wrong. Apparently »democratizing AI« means giving billionaires the power to ignore democracy at industrial scale.
we gotta up those numbers
I’m all over this multi-dimensional spectrum…
I think AI is terrible for society; at least how society is currently structured. I also think society is terrible for AI.
The reason AI sucks, and the reason we’re even calling this tier of ML “AI” to begin with, is because of global capitalism’s incentives. And the reasons “AI” is bad for society is because our society is globally capitalist. From jobs, to loneliness, to disinformation, to the environment, to education, to the lack of critical thinking,… Everything AI makes worse is already weakened by our societal systems, and they incentivize using AI to further degrade them in order to expand, control, and extract.
I love AI and the world, in theory. I hate AI and the world for how they exist right now.
Oh, billionaires are bad for society. AI is their dream tool for controlling working class masses and getting even richer.
I think their sick fantasy is replacement theory, but instead of whatever the far right thinks that is, they will attempt to replace the human workers that generate income and taxes 1:1 with robots. So they will have an obedient army of slave, just like they always wanted.
They’re discovering that this iteration of robots are way more expensive than human beings. Even well-paid, well-benefitted human beings. Data centers burn through a lot of expensive microchips quickly, and that cost is passed downstream to compute costs.
The hyperscalers are way under-charging for tokens and are hemorrhaging money, even as they borrow more for the data center buildout.
(I anticipate this desperation is what is driving the shenanigans and foul play regarding permitting and environment maintenence issues driving districts to moratorium buildout in their area. athe finance sector is notorious for overplaying their valuation and then turning to crime when they’ve borrowed over their head.)
Maybe as a society, we’ll learn to treat financial fraud as severe as it is, instead of deciding it’s too complicated to govern.
Automatically controlling** at that so the billionaires have to do even less. They are the drain on society they claim everyone else to be.
The technology has a few use cases where it is appropriate and useful. It’s the braindead MBA narcissism that wants to shove it everywhere and replace everyone that is the real problem. That’s the existential threat, not AI per se.
It turns out other businesses don’t like agentic LLM models either, when they are on the subject side of them rather than the client side.
We had a similar problem in the 2010s (maybe sooner?) that could automatically buy and sell stocks at set prices, leading to flash selloffs and resulting stock crashes.
So banks are disallowing agentic access to accounts and penalizing customers who give their access credentials to LLM agents, or have their agents harass customer service. I expect court proceedings will soon follow to determine who is responsible when agentic software becomes a public nuisance or commits a crime. (That is, commits a crime extreme enough to provoke the justice system.)
Since agents are unrestrained in pursuit of the goals they are prompted to chase, they’ve clashed harshly with human powered systems when they regard those systems like a force of nature. We may be creeping up on the first time an agent encounters an obstacle and escalates to force and deception. Watch for the first agent-filed lawsuit. Or the first agentic social engineering. Or the first agent-provoked SWATting.
In a better, more socially collaborative society, safeguards on agentic LLMs would be a priority to train them to behave appropriately in human intercourse. (All the stuff we’re trained in kindergarten.)
But IRL, in our world, bad faith engagement is the norm, and so agentic AI will soon be used as a weapon.
To date, I think, a robot has not killed anyone. Nor, I think, has anyone used a robot to kill someone else. Those firsts might be imminent.
To date, I think, a robot has not killed anyone. Nor, I think, has anyone used a robot to kill someone else. Pushing back on that with a few examples
2016, a line in the sand was crossed (my opinion), this is a robot killing someone (controlled by humans) https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/use-killer-robots-police
Ukraine beats jamming with AI: https://www.kyivpost.com/amp/post/60152
And also: AI chose targets for the US bombs: https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2026-05/news/ai-plays-major-role-war-iran
That is only what is reported. I’ll bet you a nickle the tech is in use, killing humans, right now.
Yeah, there’s a next level when an agentic AI intentionally decides to neutralize someone who is an obstruction to their goal. And it might be another category still when someone commands an agent to remove a target, and they comply.
The second category might already been met if there are autonomous weapons that can track a target in a more sophisticated process than guided missiles, say a dog-bomb bot that tracks enemy units on the ground. I wonder if we yet have agentic AI that commands other units to coordinate an attack or sweep and clear territory.
We haven’t yet seen an autonomous car kill someone (there was one incident involving a car that wasn’t supposed to be fully autonomous, so it can be attributed to driver neglect.)
I’ve also expected someone to assassinate someone else by hacking an internet-of-things medical device attached to a vulnerable patient (say a morphine feed), but that hasn’t happened to my knowledge either.
I mean if you count in like a factory setting, industrial robots were probably first killing folks in like the 70’s
Fun thing about Capitalism though, dollars = votes. So the minority with all the dollars get to make all the decisions, and the poor masses are forced to live with them.
The divide is growing, too. If this continues, we will be crouched naked in a puddle of piss and broken glass, weeping and eating worms, while the rich fly high above us in their private jets. Their only interactions with the poor will be when they molest our children or harvest our organs.
Good news, I dont have kids and my organs will surely kill them more quickly.
Yes, this is a happy consequence of my having been assiduously toxifying myself with drugs for several decades. Woe unto the fucker who tries to take my organs. At this point, I imagine they’d poison a hungry dog, stone fuckin dead.
This might be the greatest thing I’ve ever read
If only my doctors felt the same way.
Free Luigi
Well yeah it’s bad, look at the people pushing hardest for it and that tells you all you need to know.
Billionaires will use AI in every way they can to profit from you, whether it be taking your works to train it, serving you slop, trying to rope you in to paying monthly to support their multi-billion dollar boondoggle, or attacking and killing brown people, liberals, and other “undesirables.”
I wouldn’t say AI itself is bad for society, but billionaires and this current AI gold rush is.
Ai isn’t inherently bad. It’s just bad to have it in a society where your ability to get food, housing, and medical care are inherently attached to you having a job, which AI is marketed as replacing. Also, all the art that was stolen.
To be honest, I was initially in favour of the emergence of AI, but the more I use it, the more disillusioned I become. Rather than feeling like an intelligent system, it often seems rigid, lacking in genuine understanding and designed to serve the needs of only certain groups. At times, I even find it less reliable than a conventional search engine. Perhaps the real disappointment is not that AI has failed to meet every expectation, but that something presented as a remarkable leap forward can still feel so far removed from genuine intelligence.
It is less reliable than a conventional search engine. It’s lied to me before. It’s just quicker and easier than chasing down links and reading through stuff to get the info you need.
Man I have noticed a severe drop in intelligence lately.
I’m getting beyond the most basic dumb questions from people that have been in the industry long enough to know better. I know they could have answered it themselves earlier. Basically I’m getting either hard questions that the AI can’t answer, or really dumb questions that the AI chokes on because the question doesn’t make sense (“How do I log into a directory?” Yes, someone forgot about cd and asked it in such a weird way the AI was unable to understand it)
The poll is here and includes many questions beyond this one that grabbed headlines: https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2026-10/ABC-Post-Ipsos Trend Topline 10.21.pdf
Including these two questions:
Pretty consistently, about 4/10 Americans polled are irredeemable pieces of shit. Really closer to half.
Whoa human hate anything that harming their livelihood, neighborhood , hood, what a novelty idea indeed.
RTL 2
Not enough
It is how they are going about it that rustles my Jimmies.
Everyone is getting free sledgehammer. They will be delivered to your home at a time of our choosing in the method of our choosing. Property damage is a known side effect, but we hold no liability. Sidenote, your electrical bill and water bill will be going up tremendously to offset the tax breaks we’ve been alloted to harvest the lumber and ore to manufacture the sledgehammer.
Also, sledgehammer might take your job. We’ll see.
