When Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, started talking about artificial intelligence during a commencement speech at the University of Arizona on Friday, the graduates erupted in boos. “AI is going to touch everything,” said Schmidt, as his stadium-sized audience roared its disapproval. “Whatever path you choose, AI will become part of how work is done.” Maybe he meant this as a promise of opportunity, but the students seemed to hear it as a threat — or a curse.
Something similar happened at the University of Central Florida a week earlier, when real estate executive Gloria Caulfield described AI as “the next industrial revolution.” Listeners booed, and someone shouted, “AI sucks!” Caulfield appeared to be caught off guard, but she shouldn’t have been, because evidence of a ferocious backlash against AI, especially among young people, is everywhere.
One recent report found that only 18% of Gen Zers feel hopeful about AI, and almost half say the risks outweigh the benefits. Politicians with followings among young people — including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., on the left and Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback on the right — are calling for moratoriums on data centers. AI is increasingly a pop culture villain. “The people who make this stuff are losers,” said comedian Hannah Einbinder, star of HBO’s “Hacks,” a show that has put hatred of the technology at the center of its current season. There have even been some high-profile acts of anti-AI violence, including a Molotov cocktail hurled at the home of OpenAI’s chief, Sam Altman.
As Americans rebel against AI, the industry’s oligarchic leaders are responding by trying to buy even more political influence, pouring money into super political action committees and lobbying. Groups supporting AI and crypto, Politico reported this month, “are already becoming the most dominant players on the political battlefield, spending heavily for candidates on both sides of the aisle and in some cases rivaling the fundraising of long-established party groups.” The irony is that the industry’s attempts to game the democratic system are a big part of its deep unpopularity.
One reason Americans seem to despise AI more than people in other countries is that they know our government is too sclerotic to handle it. Researchers at Stanford University found that out of people in 30 countries, Americans had the least faith in their leaders’ ability to regulate AI. Internationally, people tend to feel more positively about AI when the state tries to ensure that it benefits them.
In a recent article, Bharat Ramamurti, former deputy director of President Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, described how Japan uses public funding and regulatory policy to encourage companies to use AI to complement work by humans rather than replace it. In the Nordic countries, workers often have a formal role in deciding how AI will be deployed and can use acceptance of it as a bargaining chip. As a result, there have been “plenty of technological advancements, including on AI,” he told me. (Just last month, Norway introduced self-driving buses on public roads.)
By contrast, in the United States, where neither the government nor corporations feel the need to do much for those made redundant by AI, the spread of the technology amplifies an already chronic feeling of precarity. Companies are citing AI as the reason for mass layoffs; according to the Alliance for Secure AI, there have been almost 120,000 AI-linked job losses in the United States just since last year. Recent college graduates are facing a brutal job market as entry-level positions disappear and AI renders the application process inhumanly opaque. During the dot-com boom, tech companies often seemed as if they were leading an arms race to offer new benefits to workers. Now, as Axios reported, firms are rescinding benefits to fund AI expansion.
We simply lack the political infrastructure in America to distribute AI’s benefits to the public. With the systematic evisceration of the labor movement that started during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, said Ramamurti, “the institutions that many other countries have for mediating these kinds of technological advances don’t exist in the United States.”
Of course, it’s not only in the workplace that many people feel exploited by AI. Grocery stores are using shoppers’ personal data to set pricing. Health insurance companies are employing it to decide what treatments get covered. As MarketWatch reported, a Medicare pilot program using AI for prior authorizations resulted in “some patients waiting weeks longer to get medical procedures — if they receive care at all.” For many people, AI feels extractive, not additive.
It’s telling that the generation most exposed to AI appears to like it the least. A New York Times poll released Monday shows that 47% of voters under 30 rate AI as “mostly bad,” the highest percentage in any age bracket.
AI executives, buffered by their colossal fortunes and resulting political connections, don’t seem to feel much pressure to win people over. Instead, the industry’s message is coercive and bullying: Adopt our product on our terms or be forever left behind. Tech billionaires might be less likely to announce that their inventions will cause mass unemployment if they felt constrained by public sentiment. The fact that they don’t shows how broken America’s democratic feedback loop has become.
Schmidt, of all people, should understand why many are repelled by this increasingly intrusive technology. Last year, he was a writer of a New York Times Opinion essay about how Americans “see AI as a nuisance in their daily lives,” even as it’s become more of a useful consumer tool in China. “It’s paramount that more people outside Silicon Valley feel the beneficial impact of AI,” he wrote. That can be accomplished only by political action, not hectoring. “Find a way to say yes,” Schmidt told the graduates in Arizona. Their boos were their answer: No.
