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
from a business perspective, which of those two statistics would you give more weight?