Extollation

Per Bloomberg, AI innovator Fei-Fei Li says Americans should be setting an example for the rest of the world when it comes to extolling the benefits of AI.
AI 'godmother': US skeptics have wrong mindset about the tech

Benefits for whom?

By contrast, many countries in Asia demonstrate a more positive attitude toward AI, according to Pew. Li chalks that up to a strong focus on the technology throughout early education in those regions.
AI Pioneer Fei-Fei Li Warns of Risks From Growing Tech Backlash

But a lot of counties in Asia, like China and Japan, are much higher-trust societies than the United States. And a greater focus on technology during early childhood education is not going to fix that.

This goes back to the conversation between Gavin Baker and Dario Amodei over the weekend. One of the points that Mr. Amodei made was that many people in the general public "always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over," and part of the reason for this is that companies, governments and the technology industry don't keep their promises to make things better for people.

Take Uber, for example. They promised a better way of getting a ride. Now I can't go from the airport to a hotel when I travel without giving up personal information, and Uber has been accused of monitoring the battery levels of people's phones to judge whether or not they'd be up to paying surge pricing. An unmitigated good, this isn't.

Or consider the following, from a recent episode of the podcast Decoder. Host Nilay Patel makes this observation, almost as a throwaway comment:

I had a partner at a very, very large consulting firm tell me they had done hundreds of AI deployments and less than two dozen had yielded positive ROI. I said, “Can you just tell me that on the record?” And he said, “Absolutely not. We want hundreds more.”

If businesses won't be honest about the results their enterprise customers can expect, because they want to keep selling lucrative, but non-cost-effective, services, why would anyone think that businesses would be more forthcoming with the public?

Senator Josh Hawley can open a Congressional subcommittee hearing with: "We’re here today to talk about one of the effects of this AI boom: the partnership between the AI industry and some of the biggest corporations in America to effectively scam consumers out of every last dollar they have in order to buy products that they need and rely on," without sounding like crackpot because people honestly believe that immiserating them for the benefit of executives and wealthy investors is the plan. It's unrealistic to presume that people going to extol the benefits of a technology that they understand is primarily intended to be a weapon against them.

There are a lot of technology boosters and techno-optimists who will happily pontificate about how generative automation, general artificial intelligence or what-have-you will make work optional and usher in a post-scarcity, utopian, society. All companies have to do to get there is receive a subsidy in the form of massive amounts of data from the public without needing to pay for any of it. I suspect that it's rational for people to be suspicious that a industry that claims that paying for its inputs will doom it will actually be ready, willing and/or able to share the wealth later.