Silicon Valley Doesn’t Get Why You Hate AI

硅谷为何无法理解你对人工智能的厌恶

Silicon Valley is trying to make sense of the growing backlash against artificial intelligence, but so far, it’s not going that well. The inconvenient truth is that a significant portion of the world is not optimistic about the technology they’re building. But recent attempts to diagnose the root of the problem by CEOs like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei indicate they don’t understand what’s actually driving society’s disdain for AI.

硅谷正试图理清人们对人工智能日益增长的抵触情绪，但到目前为止，进展并不顺利。一个令人尴尬的事实是，世界上很大一部分人对他们正在构建的技术并不感到乐观。然而，Meta 的马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）和 Anthropic 的达里奥·阿莫代（Dario Amodei）等首席执行官近期试图诊断问题根源的尝试表明，他们并不理解究竟是什么在驱动社会对人工智能的蔑视。

The rest of popular culture, meanwhile, is finding ways to capitalize on AI hate. Just look at this new commercial for Liquid Death and Garage Beer. The two beverage brands teamed up with former Philadelphia Eagles football player and Taylor Swift brother-in-law Jason Kelce, who invited people to pee in bottles and send them to AI data centers. In an interview with Marketing Dive, Liquid Death’s creative lead said the data center backlash was “literally the one thing that unites all Americans right now.”

与此同时，流行文化界正在寻找利用“AI 仇恨”获利的方法。看看 Liquid Death 和 Garage Beer 的这则新广告吧。这两个饮料品牌与前费城老鹰队橄榄球运动员、泰勒·斯威夫特（Taylor Swift）的姐夫杰森·凯尔西（Jason Kelce）合作，邀请人们往瓶子里撒尿，并将其寄往人工智能数据中心。在接受《Marketing Dive》采访时，Liquid Death 的创意总监表示，对数据中心的抵触情绪“确实是目前唯一能团结所有美国人的事情”。

More than half of Americans under 30 say they are more concerned than excited about AI, a figure that’s grown 24 percent in the last five years, according to a Pew Research Center survey published earlier this week. More than 70 percent of people polled in all age groups say they believe AI will lead to fewer jobs.

根据皮尤研究中心本周早些时候发布的一项调查，超过半数的 30 岁以下美国人表示，他们对人工智能感到担忧多过兴奋，这一比例在过去五年中增长了 24%。在所有年龄段的受访者中，超过 70% 的人认为人工智能将导致就业岗位减少。

But other recent polling data shows that people have broader anxieties about the technology that go far beyond jobs and the data center boom. Americans also think AI will harm young people’s ability to form meaningful relationships, that tech companies should be required to compensate creators whose works were used to train models, and that AI could harm the critical thinking skills of students.

但其他近期的民调数据显示，人们对这项技术的焦虑范围更广，远不止于就业和数据中心扩张。美国人还认为，人工智能会损害年轻人建立有意义人际关系的能力；他们认为科技公司应该被要求补偿那些作品被用于训练模型的内容创作者；并担心人工智能可能会损害学生的批判性思维能力。

The tech industry often chalks up the AI backlash to a communication and branding problem, but it’s much deeper than that. Hearing different messages around AI made little difference in people’s opinions on the technology’s societal impact, according to a recent survey from the Searchlight Institute.

科技行业通常将人工智能的抵触情绪归咎于沟通和品牌推广问题，但事实远不止于此。根据 Searchlight Institute 最近的一项调查，听到关于人工智能的不同信息，对人们关于该技术社会影响的看法几乎没有产生任何改变。

While Silicon Valley is starting to grapple with growing negative public sentiment about AI, investors and executives I talk to have grown increasingly worried that the industry is failing to fully comprehend how big of a problem this could be for adoption of AI products.

虽然硅谷开始着手应对公众对人工智能日益增长的负面情绪，但我交谈过的投资者和高管们越来越担心，整个行业未能充分理解这对人工智能产品的普及可能构成多大的问题。

Earlier this month, Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word essay painting his optimistic vision of an AI future. The Meta CEO described a world in which everyone has a personalized AI assistant that knows you intimately (presumably from all the personal information Meta’s apps have collected) and can help with your career, hobbies, and perhaps even raising your children. Of course, such a product doesn’t exist yet, but Zuckerberg is basically arguing that giving everyone unfettered access to highly capable AI is the best-case scenario for this technology.

本月初，扎克伯格发表了一篇 6500 字的文章，描绘了他对人工智能未来的乐观愿景。这位 Meta 首席执行官描述了一个世界：每个人都有一个了解你内心深处的个性化人工智能助手（大概是通过 Meta 应用收集的所有个人信息），它可以帮助你处理职业、爱好，甚至可能是抚养孩子。当然，这样的产品目前还不存在，但扎克伯格的基本论点是，让每个人都能不受限制地使用功能强大的 AI，是这项技术发展的最佳方案。

I’m optimistic that AI will continue getting better and more helpful, but I’m skeptical that this will be enough to transform the way people feel about it. For people to even use the theoretical product Zuckerberg envisions, they will need to have a lot of trust in the companies that build it. Current polling suggests that the AI industry has yet to earn that trust.

我对人工智能将继续变得更好、更有用持乐观态度，但我怀疑这是否足以改变人们对它的看法。要让人们使用扎克伯格设想的那种理论产品，他们需要对构建这些产品的公司有足够的信任。目前的民调显示，人工智能行业尚未赢得这种信任。

The Meta CEO also made a not-so-subtle jab at Amodei, saying he was surprised that “discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom.” On social media and during an appearance on the All-In podcast, tech investor Gavin Baker reiterated Zuckerberg’s points and went even further, writing that “Dario’s messaging has been massively helpful to efforts to ban data centers here in America.” White House AI adviser and All-In co-host David Sacks chimed in as well, writing that Anthropic’s “narratives have done more than anything to shape public fear.”

这位 Meta 首席执行官还含蓄地抨击了阿莫代，称他对“许多人工智能开发者言论中充斥着末日论调”感到惊讶。在社交媒体上以及在《All-In》播客节目中，科技投资者加文·贝克（Gavin Baker）重申了扎克伯格的观点，甚至更进一步写道：“达里奥的言论对美国国内禁止数据中心的努力起到了巨大的推动作用。”白宫人工智能顾问兼《All-In》联合主持人戴维·萨克斯（David Sacks）也附和道，Anthropic 的“叙事对塑造公众恐惧感的影响超过了任何其他因素”。

These comments prompted a rare public response from Amodei, who published a lengthy social media post in which he rejected the idea that his messaging was the culprit of the AI backlash.

这些评论引发了阿莫代罕见的公开回应。他发布了一篇冗长的社交媒体文章，否认他的言论是导致人工智能抵触情绪的罪魁祸首。

“I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust,” Amodei wrote. “I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. The causes of this go back decades and AI is just the latest iteration of it.”

“我认为这从根本上是一场信任危机，”阿莫代写道。“我认为普通民众不信任公司、政府或科技行业，总是怀疑我们正在酝酿什么新的方式来坑害他们。造成这种情况的原因可以追溯到几十年前，而人工智能只是其中的最新表现形式。”

Amodei’s initial assertions ring closer to the truth, but he loses me later on. He went on to write that “the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world.” One example he cites is the promise that AI will find a cure for cancer, a goal he’s previously said that people should reasonably expect the technology to achieve.

阿莫代最初的断言更接近事实，但随后他的观点让我无法苟同。他接着写道：“对包括 Anthropic 在内的人工智能公司最准确的批评是，我们尚未兑现造福世界的宏大承诺。”他引用的一个例子是人工智能将找到癌症治愈方法的承诺，他此前曾表示，人们应该合理地期待这项技术实现这一目标。

Amodei, and Silicon Valley broadly, may be missing the forest for the trees here. The AI backlash was not caused by scary warnings about the future from tech CEOs, or the fact that OpenAI and Anthropic have not yet cured cancer. It’s about the ways AI is already starting to change society, which many Americans fear is for the worse.

阿莫代以及整个硅谷可能在这里“只见树木，不见森林”。人工智能的抵触情绪并非源于科技公司首席执行官们对未来的可怕警告，也不是因为 OpenAI 和 Anthropic 尚未治愈癌症。问题的核心在于人工智能已经开始改变社会的方式，而许多美国人担心这种改变正在让社会变得更糟。

Tech companies have spent enormous effort making physical data centers more digestible to the public, with promises around responsible water usage, clean energy commitments, and investments in local communities. But unfortunately for them, there’s a lot of evidence suggesting that the data center buildout has simply become the physical manifestation of people’s hatred of AI and the ways tech companies engage with communities overall.

科技公司投入了巨大努力，试图让公众更容易接受实体数据中心，包括承诺负责任地用水、做出清洁能源承诺以及对当地社区进行投资。但不幸的是，大量证据表明，数据中心的建设已经成为人们对人工智能以及科技公司与社区互动方式整体不满的物理表现。

I often talk to rank-and-file employees at AI companies who understand these issues and hear about the backlash from their own families and friends across the country. But the leaders at the center of the AI boom still appear to be unprepared to address all the ways in which AI is changing the world. Silicon Valley will need to find a way to confront these issues more directly in the future if it wants people to fully embrace the products it’s building.

我经常与人工智能公司的普通员工交谈，他们了解这些问题，并从全国各地的家人和朋友那里听到过这种抵触情绪。但处于人工智能繁荣中心的领导者们似乎仍未准备好应对人工智能改变世界的方方面面。如果硅谷希望人们完全拥抱它所构建的产品，未来就需要找到一种更直接的方式来面对这些问题。

This is an edition of Maxwell Zeff’s Model Behavior newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

本文摘自 Maxwell Zeff 的《Model Behavior》通讯。点击此处阅读往期通讯。