revealed preference theory is typically applied to individuals or single decision-making units like a household, rather than worldwide aggregate market behavior.
in any case, its not really that complicated in this case.
- the ai companies have a billion active users and billions of dollars in revenue.
- a poll comes back with 30% of respondents saying they are angry about ai.
so, why do the ai companies keep doing ai things despite ~30% of people not liking ai? well, its because they are making billions of dollars in revenue from their billion users. from the ai company's perspective, it would be madness not to keep shoving ai everywhere.
It can be simultaneously true that a large part of the public objects to a thing while the market generates profits from that very thing.
Of course the answer is for governments to step in as, as you point out, the AI-related companies are behaving as rational actors given their incentive structure.
I don't hate the data centers near me. However I do hate the tax incentives they were given. My local school district could really use those millions of dollars per year that someone decided we don't get.
But a billion active users != number of US citizens that take on the burden of AI. So go build your AI on land where your customers are if they like it so much.
Yeah in the states where the majority of people approve. But we already know the data centers aren’t being built in those areas. They’re being enforced on people who for the most part dont approve of their intent.
this does not matter from the business perspective.
microsoft does not care that your company forces you to use their products. google does not care that your school forces you to use their products. TSMC does not care that you are forced to use their products when purchasing ~any electronics. etc.
If a large proportion of people are only using AI because they are being threatened with unemployment if they don't, then there's going to be massive resentment building up
You may think that doesn't matter, but it does. History has shown over and over that you can only keep a lid on massive social resentment for so long before things break
I think good governance would listen to polls over metrics.
A good example of how this works is cocaine.
Capitalism and competition isn't always good governance. It works brilliantly in many places, such as restaurants or commodity goods. It fails completely for medicine or banking. It's in between for tech or education, but it's clearly failing for AI.
>I think good governance would listen to polls over metrics.
hypothetically, you own a widget company. you sell a lot of widgets. every month, you are selling even more widgets. the widgets are flying off the shelves. you keep ramping up production, and the consumers keep on buying.
gallup releases a poll that says "people hate widgets".
>why should a company listen to a gallup poll of ~1,500 people over their own internal metrics?
for the same reason Vladimir Putin should listen to Russian milbloggers rather than his own subordinates, the metrics are being cooked up by people who get promoted for good metrics
yes I would not turn my whole company into a widget producing company, just like I wouldn't turn my 17th century Dutch company into a Tulip factory just because they're flying off the shelves. Mind you we're talking about Meta, which is only named 'Meta' because they did that whole bit once already when they became the metaverse company which is an awkward name now given that everyone coincidentally seems to have forgotten about that entire thing
Also the shelf metaphor is itself troubled because you're not even really selling any widgets for profit, you're just handing them out for free at the expense of hundreds of billions in investments that really are going to deprecate pretty fast
The public is against it for hypocritical reasons that they're not afraid to inflict on someone else. They're against the water and electricity use but they also angrily demand more semiconductor production that require building whole new reservoirs in Tainan, irrigation channels from the Han river, and coal plants in Anhui, as well as restarting Fukushima. Then when those companies come build plants in Arizona and New York, suddenly the reality of how the cow is butchered hits them and it stalls in permitting for years.
The public hates ai but also uses ai in mass quantities.
Capitalism abides by your dollars not your voice.
So people can decry ai all they want but if they keep using it, it won't go away.
Even then it's probable that AI is a big enough productivity boost for certain industries that even if no consumers used AI, businesses would still prop AI up enough for it to live on.
Arguably, they don't take one in the chest. Luigi Mangione lives in notoriety what he did; most people can't even name the CEO he killed, let alone frame them as a martyr.
I disagree with theories of continual revolution, but it's pretty clear that class warfare still has valuable asymmetric qualities.
Nah, dollars buy war machines. And for the first time in human history, we are on the precipice of projecting substantial ground force without the need for humans.
The public is forced to use AI at work and outside of work because the corpos are determined in inserting their AI everywhere. Then the people come back home and see that their energy bills have doubled because of AI datacenters. Of course people hate AI.
Yeah but the public is against progress. The public cries for material needs like medicare for all, universal childcare, a jobs program? These are all clearly foreign actors that want to prevent American progress on AI! They must be Chinese agents for all we know, what sort of American wants to provide healthcare for their family over proudly paying higher utility rates to ensure a new batch of tech bros become billionaires?
