Technology

Guys. I just found out were supposed to "believe" in or trust democracy.

I had no idea!

You need to be able to tell that something is wrong with this headline without anyone explaining it to you.

This is a spurious correlation if I've ever seen one.

Perceiving the government as loudly and publicly placing anything ahead of regular people and their jobs is what erodes democracy. The feeling that someone is not represented to elected representatives. Most elections over the last 30 years have been about this as a core economic element. Globalzied manufacturing was the Big Bad for decades before AI came along.

People who perceive artificial intelligence as destroying jobs are significantly more dissatisfied with the functioning of democracy.

This line from the article is significantly different from the headline

The AI slop used to write that "article" was stuck on autorepeat.

You should fix the clanker.

Perceiving AI as a 'job killer' negatively influences attitudes towards democracy...

Towards democracy, or towards AI? I feel like this is bait and switch.

Important to note that most of the "AI will take your job" rhetoric is spun up by the AI industry, not fact

Not sure I like that this headline / research seems to frame the issue as a PR problem. I don't want to be filled with a bunch of AI slop to try to convince me that AI is not a threat to my job. I think overall I have a pretty balanced view of AI — though how many of us realize when we are unhinged — but I think it'll eventually settle into a tool which increases efficiency, slightly reduces jobs in certain sectors just like the farm combine did, and not a lot will change overall.

The thing negatively influencing my faith in democracy is so many of the people of the world voting for right-wing and autocratic parties. I feel like democracy has failed us in that respect. On the other hand I don't know of a better solution. AI isn't really involved there.

I wonder if there isn't a more fundamental connection between people who observe the direction of the world and those who see that corporations are falling over themselves to eliminate workers and are deeply worried that they just might succeed to the detriment of all.

I perceive the paradigm of the economy and capitalist demands on labor as eroding my trust in democracy and participation in society.

The article itself looks like it's written with AI. Inconsistencies, repetitions, dull language and an unnecessary bullet point summary at the end. While I haven't read the actual study, nothing in the article seems to explain what makes this causation instead of correlation.

Personally I'm a bit annoyed with articles like these because they try to create the impression that criticism of AI only stems from it being too powerful, instead of recognizing that the technology has very real capability limits. What is presented as two opposing viewpoints is effectively just one. AI boosters and AI doomers are both strong believers in something that hasn't happened yet and probably won't happen for a very long time.