alt Hacker NewsEveryone I know loves AI. It is actively making their lives better. All kinds of people, all kind of ages - universally love it and use it every day for all kind of stuff (shopping, health, learning, home improvement, etc, etc).
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You must live in a bubble; 16% of Americans think AI is making their lives better, the remainder are evenly split between not knowing and disliking it.
It's still inevitable, but people aren't dumb, and they know that it's only going to help those who manage to escape the permanent underclass.
It'll eliminate the toil of thinking, but that also means that the people who make a living selling their thinking will end up replaced. Educators especially -- because, once we've automated thinking, it becomes economically worthless. Strength used to be very important, until the industrial revolution replaced muscle with steam and steel. AI will do the same for brains, and thinking will become a sport, similar to weight lifting; most people simply won't bother. Some people will win in this world, lots are going to lose.
We're obviously not there yet, but if you think to where we were two years ago, we're probably only a few breakthroughs and improvements away.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/712751/americans-cool-toward.as...
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/only-16-percent-of-america...
I see it ruining interactions at work. There's a lot of meat-proxy-ism going on, where people copy-and-paste back and forth between AI.
It's filling the Internet with trash. Look around anywhere: Reddit, YouTube, individual blogs, it doesn't matter. You'll find generative garbage as far as the eye can see. Not all generative content is bad, but a lot of it is outright crap.
It can be a productive tool though. Still, I don't find it enjoyable to use. If you like the "journey" of programming (tinkering, "figuring things out", problem solving), you won't like AI as much. It removes the fun part. If you like the "destination" (the end result of building a thing), you'll love it.
What country/region of country (if US) do you live in? Everyone I know absolutely hates it and hates the direction things are going. I'm pulling from a wide sample here too -- I have a lot of friends who work blue collar jobs that hate it just as much as my tech worker friends. However I will say I'm in my late 20s and it seems like my age group and younger are more anti-AI than any other age bracket.
Poe's Law win?
The people I know who like it the most are at least aware of a lot of the problems with it. I’m surprised everyone in your friend group is uncritically enamored by it.