Friedberg: 3 Reasons Why College Students Are Booing AI

When you hear young people booing AI, why are they doing that? >> I think that there's an underlying view that technology creates leverage for a small group of people, which creates power imbalances. And nothing represents that more than AI. that a small number of people that control and profit from and benefit from AI are going to end up getting outsized returns relative to the broader population. That the time to diffusion of the technology because ultimately all technologies commoditize and diffuse but the time to diffusion here is such that it's going to be extremely asymmetric for society. And because those questions about when does this benefit me, how does it benefit me

can't be answered today, the economic benefit that's acrewing to the few today becomes the narrative. It becomes the story and it becomes this like power system that a few people take from the many. And so there's something deeply disturbing for the average person about that. They don't understand how it works, why it works, what it'll do for them, when it will do it. and all that they're being told is that some people are making trillions of dollars. So, I think that it's pretty obvious why this has got such a backlash. Secondly, I think that there's a deep amount of external energy that's fueling this anti-technology sentiment in the United States and has been for decades. I don't

think it's just China with NOS's today. I think that there is a long history of state actors intervening in media activities in foreign nations to try and create the sentiment and fuel a sentiment that reduces progress in that competitive state. This third piece is when the capernac revolution happened. It was a mind heliocentricity was a totally new way of thinking for humans and it was uh deeply disruptive to the church and it was deeply disruptive to the power centers which were the centers that could tell people earth is at the center of the universe. We're in control. We're the direct channel to God. And the idea that the sun is at the center of the solar system and we spin

around it and we're a tiny speck in the universe was very hard for people to grasp. There's something about AI that's very like not human centric and it kind of shifts and fs with the ego of the human. It's almost anti-humanist and I think that that's like a deep psychological current a lot of people and their disdain for this technology. It it fuels it. It's not the cause, but I think it feels