Opinion | Graduating Into A.I. Pessimism

Source Domain: www.nytimes.com

I hate A.I. And I have always assumed that the backlash was coming. “A.I. sucks!” But I guess the thing that I didn’t see coming was that it would be led by people even younger than me. “Artificial intelligence.” “A.I.” “Artificial intelligence.” You might have seen graduates booing the mention of A.I. at their commencements this spring. “Interesting.” “Whew.” You know, not cranky, middle-aged Luddites, but the people who are digital natives who have grown up with this technology. “I ain’t gonna trust A.I. no more.” “The people who make this stuff are losers.” A New York Times poll released in May showed that 47 percent of voters under 30 say that A.I. has been more bad than good, which is the highest percentage in any age bracket. It’s been especially bad for new graduates, both because the entry-level jobs that they’ve been training for are being systematically eviscerated by A.I., and when they try to apply for jobs, they’re sending their résumés out into this Kafkaesque A.I. netherworld where they have no idea if a real person is even going to look at it. “If we do see this economywide boost in productivity and economic growth from A.I., how are we going to make sure that working people are cut in on that for once?” I spoke to Bharat Ramamurti. He pointed out that other countries have taken much more robust approaches to regulating A.I. And as a result, people seem to feel much more comfortable about it. So, for example, in the Nordic countries, where they have something called sectoral bargaining, people can kind of bargain on behalf of an entire profession. Whereas in the United States, where people already experience an enormous degree of precarity in their economic lives, A.I. has just been something that’s made that a lot worse. “Deal with it. Like I said, it’s a tool.” There have been a lot of A.I.-linked layoffs. “The A.I. models learn from having real — from watching really smart people do…

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