Fear-jerker: America’s AI backlash
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Why are American voters from both parties united in fearing AI’s impact?
The Economist.
Hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm Rosie Blow
and I'm Jason Palmer.
Today on the show, divorce rates rise in China, and why many Europeans see air conditioning as a moral choice.
But first
In a democratic primary in New York this week, one of the candidates, Alex Boris, who's a former computer scientist, was campaigning very hard on the idea of tighter guardrails for AI firms and their technology.
And last year I passed the strongest AI safety bill in the country called the RAIS Act.
You had a whole bunch of political action committees backed by big AI firms spending millions of dollars to try to defeat him.
You had a bunch of different AI firms spending also millions of dollars trying to support him because they think their industry needs to be better regulated.
Robert Guest is the Economist Deputy Editor.
In the end, Bores lost, but he lost to a conventional candidate who also came out on the day of his victory and said that he too was going to campaign to regulate AI companies more strictly. And that's just one example of how AI has become a politically explosive issue in America. And we're going to see a lot more of this.
If this is such a politically explosive issue, where do the fault lines come?
Well, this is interesting because America at the moment is a country where you cannot normally get Democrats and Republicans to agree on anything at all, instinctively, if one party is for it, we're against it. But that's not true about AI. You find that both groups have almost exactly the same fears. You have both Republicans and Democrats really worried by the idea that human jobs might be replaced by machines, that in the future they won't have any jobs at all. I think possibly the most important statistic here Americans are thirty times likelier to think that AI is advancing too quickly than to think it's advancing too slowly. Only two percent think it's going too slowly. This speaks to the real fear that people have about change and
That is going this fast.
We also spend a lot of time hearing about the opportunities and benefits of AI. So why are so many people in America so pessimistic about it?
It is really striking. There was a Pew poll last year which found that Americans were more pessimistic about the technology than people in any of the other twenty-four countries that were surveyed. And it breaks down into different reasons. About two-thirds of them think that AI will reduce the number of jobs available in America. More than seventy percent fret that it's going to exacerbate mental health problems or worry about the concentration of power in tech firms. And then a sizable minority, forty-one percent, say they're either very or somewhat concerned that AI might actually cause human extinction.
What does the Pew poll reveal about Americans’ pessimism toward AI?
Any even small risk of that is something you might be troubled by.
It's quite a laundry list of anxieties as well as opportunities. Are the concerns about it the same on the left and the right?
The thing that's different is that you hear a lot more people on the left being opposed to billionaires, being concerned about inequality, and particularly being hostile to billionaires who suck up to Trump, or the trillionaire who pals around with Trump and wants to put data centers in space. But at the same time, on the right as well, you've got quite a lot of people who are. Suspicious of the Californian tech elite and don't like the idea of a country where they're the most powerful people. So you do hear a lot of the same concerns there. And then if you get to things like people's children, I mean I talked to really quite far-left people at a progressive conference in America, and we've talked to socially conservative Senator Josh Hawley, and they both say pretty much the same thing about their children.
They say Say you have children in this country who are growing up thinking that it's much easier to form a relationship with an AI chatbot than it is with a human being because they never reject you, they never tell you that anything wrong with you, you're not getting any of the normal social cues that you get from the rough and tumble of growing up.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why are American voters from both parties united in fearing AI’s impact?
0:03–3:43
2
What does the Pew poll reveal about Americans’ pessimism toward AI?
3:43–6:57
3
How are data‑center projects becoming a flashpoint in U.S. communities?
6:57–9:49
4
What policy options could curb AI‑driven job loss and wealth concentration?
9:49–12:45
5
Why are divorce rates soaring in China and what legal hurdles remain?
12:45–15:41
6
How have recent Chinese law changes altered the path to divorce?
15:41–18:14
7
Why do Europeans treat air‑conditioning as a moral choice?
18:14–20:32
8
What does Europe’s renewable energy mix mean for the future of cooling?
20:32–20:55