It can proofread my blog posts, be my search engine, help me decorate my room, translate other languages for me, teach me math, explain tax documents, and so on. This is just the beginning of what AI can do, of course.

It's possibly the most general-purpose technology ever invented, since its basic function is to memorize the entire corpus of human knowledge and then spit any piece of it back to you on command. And because it's programmed to do everything with a smile, it's always friendly and cheerful - just like a little robot friend ought to be.

No, AI doesn't always get everything right. It makes mistakes fairly regularly. But I never expected engineers to be able to create some kind of infallible god-oracle that knows every truth in the Universe. C-3PO gets stuff confidently wrong all the time, as does the computer on Star Trek. For that matter, so does my dad. So does every human being I've ever met, and every news website I've ever read, and every social media account I've ever followed.

Just like with every other source of information and assistance you've ever encountered in your life, AI needs to be cross-checked before you can believe 100% in whatever it tells you. Infallible omniscience is still beyond the reach of modern engineering.

Who cares? This is an amazingly useful technology, and I love using it. It has opened my informational horizons by almost as much as the internet itself, and made my life far more convenient. Even without the expected impacts on productivity, innovation, and so on, just having this little robot friend would be enough for me to say that AI has improved my life enormously.

This instinctive, automatic reaction to such a magical new tool seems utterly natural to me. And yet when I say this on social media, people pop out of the woodwork to denounce AI and ridicule anyone who likes it. Here are just a few examples:

Normally I would just dismiss these outbursts as non-representative. But in this case, there's pretty robust survey data showing that the American public is overwhelmingly negative on AI. These social media malcontents may be unusually vituperative, but their opinions probably aren't out of the mainstream.

What's going on here? Why doesn't everyone else love having a little robot friend who can answer lots of their questions and perform lots of their menial tasks?

I guess it makes sense that for a lot of people, the potential negative externalities - deepfakes, the decline of critical thinking, ubiquitous slop, or the risk that bad actors will be able to use AI to do major violence - loom large.

Other people, like artists or translators, may fear for their careers. I think it's likely that in the long run, our society will learn to deal with all those challenges, but as Keynes said,“in the long run we're all dead.”

And yet the instinctive negativity with which AI is being met by a large segment of the American public feels like an unreasonable reaction to me. Although externalities and distributional disruptions certainly exist, the specific concerns that many of AI's most strident critics cite are often nonsensical.

One of the most common talking points you hear about AI is that data centers use a ton of water, potentially causing water shortages. For example, Rolling Stone recently put out an article by Sean Patrick Cooper, entitled“The Precedent Is Flint: How Oregon's Data Center Boom Is Supercharging a Water Crisis.” Here's what it claimed:

The idea that AI data centers are water-guzzlers has become standard canon in many areas of the internet - especially among progressives. And yet it's just not a real issue. Andy Masley finally got fed up and dug into the data, writing an epic blog post that debunked every single version of the“AI uses lots of water” narrative:

Masley notes that A) almost all of the water AI uses is actually used by power plants generating electricity to power AI, and B) most of the water that gets“used” by AI is actually just run through the system and returned to the original source, instead of being used up. He writes:

He then goes on to pull a bunch of numbers that show that AI's actual water consumption isn't a problem (yet):

And he includes a chart for comparison to other water uses:

He goes on to debunk other aspects of the“AI water use” story, showing that data centers haven't hurt water availability in local areas, and that data centers aren't a major source of pollution. After that, he goes through some articles claiming a link between AI and water use, and finds that either their data is obviously wrong, or they don't even cite data.

Masley is especially annoyed with a book by Karen Hao called“Empire of AI“, which made huge math errors about AI water use:

Hao later admitted some serious data errors in her book.

Anyway, Masley's whole post is very long and involved, and it links to a bunch of other long and involved posts on the various subtopics. If you're interested in the“AI water use” issue at all, this is a must-read.

I'm not sure I've ever seen so thorough a debunking of a popular belief. Some AI critics like Timnit Gebru attacked Masley, but were not able to muster any substantive rebuttal; instead, they simply suggested that Masley speak to activists:

There are two things that are especially frustrating about the“AI and water use” argument. First, there's the powerlessness of facts in the face of viral misinformation. If a bogus claim gets repeated by enough people, it becomes its own sort of echo chamber, where observers believe the false claim because they think they've heard it from multiple sources.

Politically motivated reasoning only adds to that effect - a lot of Americans fear AI and want to find a reason why it's bad, so they latch onto the“water use” story without checking to see if it's real.

The second frustrating thing is that there's a much better argument sitting right there for the taking. AI doesn't use up much water, and probably won't for the foreseeable future.

But it does use a hell of a lot of electricity, and this could pose a problem if the tech keeps scaling up. That electricity use can strain local grids and raise carbon emissions. It's a real challenge! And yet AI critics tend to ignore this grounded and reasonable worry in favor of the“water use” myth.

Nor is this the only such example. Aaron Regunberg, writing in The New Republic, trots out a vast litany of accusations against AI, most of which don't hold up under scrutiny. For example, he claims that an AI crash would wipe out normal Americans while preserving the wealth of AI's creators:

But that's absurd. Gita Gopinath's analysis, which Regunberg cites, is all about stock wealth. Most of the wealth of the people who create AI is in their own company's stocks, so they would absolutely get wiped out in a crash.

Regular Americans would get hurt a bit, but most of their wealth is in their houses. Almost all American stocks are owned by the rich. In fact, there was a tech stock crash in 2022, and wealth inequality went down as a result.

Anyway, Regunberg continues:

The studies Regunberg cites, predicting how many jobs will be“replaced”, actually say no such thing, as I explained in this post back in 2023.

They are merely engineers' guesses about which jobs will be affected by AI. In fact, one recent study found that industries that are predicted to use AI more are seeing no slowdown in wages, and have experienced robust employment growth for workers in their 30s, 40s and 50s.

The study did find a slowdown in hiring for younger workers. But other studies find no effect of AI on jobs at all so far. Obviously, many workers are afraid of losing their jobs to AI, but those losses don't seem to have materialized yet, so it's a bit silly when AI critics like Regunberg present job losses as established fact.

How can folks like Regunberg, Gebru, Hao, and Cooper get away with such incredible sloppiness? Unfortunately, the answer is“motivated reasoning.” So many Americans feel so negatively about AI that if some writer or intellectual comes up and makes some claim that AI is a water-guzzler or is causing mass unemployment, some people will believe it. Fear and anger have a way of finding their own justifications.

So I don't think there's much I can do about the unreasonable negative emotions being directed at AI in the United States. I've simply got to reconcile myself to the fact that my delight in this new technology is a rare minority position.

I do think there are probably some things that AI companies can do to improve their image with the American public. But for now, all I can do is lament that a country that once boldly embraced the future now quails at it.

1 In fact, I'd argue that the Star Trek computer is the sci-fi portrayal of AI that most accurately predicts modern generative AI. Whole plots of Star Trek: The Next Generation revolve around holodeck prompts that generate hallucinations.

2 A.O. Hirshman

This article was first published on Noah Smith's Noahpinion Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become a Noahopinion subscriber here.

Sign up here to comment on Asia Times stories Or Sign in to an existing accoun

Thank you for registering!

An account was already registered with this email. Please check your inbox for an authentication link.

Sign up for one of our free newsletters

• The Daily Report Start your day right with Asia Times' top stories
• AT Weekly Report A weekly roundup of Asia Times' most-read stories

• Click to share on X (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedI
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Faceboo
• Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) WhatsAp
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddi
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Emai
• Click to print (Opens in new window) Prin