alt Hacker NewsMost Americans don't trust AI – or the people in charge of it (2025)
Comments
(2025)
Misleading OP
I don't think they'd hate AI so much if they didn't see it as being controlled by the same people (and types of people) who made Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc. all go downhill over the last decade and suck.
Now if they could just vote for politicians and a political party that will do something about it…we might get somewhere.
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The problem is more general. Trust in American institutions peaked in the 1950s. Starting in the 1960s, Americans began to slowly withdraw from institutions, and also distrust them. Robert Putnam covers this in his book "Bowling Alone." Americans stopped going to the local meetings of their local town government, and Americans became more suspicious of local decisions. Americans became less interested in local news and more interested in national news (partly that was the shift in news-consumption-habits away from the local paper and towards national television). Americans slowly became more likely to believe in conspiracy theories of all kinds. During the 1970s, Americans demanded more democracy from their institutions, and many reforms were passed, including the Sunshine Laws, that were passed in almost all 50 states, making government more transparent, yet Americans became less trusting despite the greater transparency. Also during the 1970s, Americans demanded that the inner workings of Congress be made more democratic, and so the committee chairmen were stripped of their powers and each committee became purer in its democracy, which caused more procedural motions, which slowed down the actual work, which caused Americans to trust Congress less. Barbara Sinclair wrote a famous book (at least it was famous within the world of political science) called "Unorthodox Lawmaking" which tracks the breakdown of the normal lawmaking processes of Congress during the period from 1970 to 2015. All of these trends were mild from 1960 to 2000 and then they accelerated after 2000. Americans became less trusting of church, government, charity, the police, the teachers, the newspapers, the Fed, the CIA, the FBI, the unions, the Boy Scouts, and Americans became more divided over the military. There was an increase in general paranoia. The current frenzy over AI is part of the longer trend.
From what I can tell, all of America's institutions were reformed during the era after 1970 and yet Americans became less trustful of those same institutions. It is likely that some of the reforms had negative side effects, especially the attempt to make the committees inside of Congress more pure in their democracy, thereby making them less effective.
This feels like fake news, like the people asked leading questions. going by what I actually see, I see regular people using ai constantly at coffee shops and cafes all over the world. Non tech friends tell me all the things they are doing with ai from various learning things to planning parties to organizing meetings, designing business plans, etc
I see no evidence American’s don’t trust AI so I suspect loaded questions
if ai stans want to build trust in AI, they should have embraced sensible regulation instead of spending millions to elect pols unwilling to lift a single finger.
congrats, you have regulatory captured the entire industry and the U.S. government. everybody hates you because they can see money leaving their community to inflate the stock portfolio of some asshole on a yacht.