Comment by mips_avatar

I am from Vienna, and this is completely false. Likewise, my friends from many countries, incl. Vietnam, also share the sentiment you describe as "American". Your point has no standing.

> It's uniquely American to believe that your life will end when AI takes your job.

It's probably because it's uniquely American for a sizable chunk of the workforce to have cushy jobs that appear ripe for the picking.

AI is not going to immediately replace food service work, manual labor, farming, hospitality, etc.

But it might replace quite high-paid software jobs, finance jobs, legal jobs, etc. One, if AI is good at anything it's things at least tangential to this. Two, these have costs high enough that off-setting is at least worth trying.

My suspicion is that ultimately it will lead to more of these types of jobs, though it could easily come with a huge reduction - and the jobs aren't guaranteed to be in the same countries.

You could create 3x as many of these jobs, and still end up with -25% of them in the US. Who knows.

A big part of it is insurance. Family coverage can easily cost $15-20k per year in the US. Avoiding the need to pay for this out of pocket drives a lot of people into less than optimal job dependence.

It's because most people are already teetering on the edge. The difference between working in software vs anywhere else in the US is that the average atlassianer or similar is spending 3 months 4 times a year writing js from beach resorts up and down Europe while keeping a condo in new york. The rest can't afford to own a home or dental insurance. So when people are threatening those people who barely have anything as it is they get heated.

It's part of the messianic end-times fervor that has been with America since the beginning...which is useful for imperial management...As it provides a constant source of existential judgement and dread...that religious/quasi-religious administrators can exploit.

I think you do have a point here, but I should like to point out that, since you mentioned Vienna, barely anyone here sees AI being tightly integrated into anything. Sure, smartphone users may use it; and exams at universities may say "don't use AI", so people use it - but for most everyday stuff it is really barely noticeable here. This is why I also disagree with "they will have a good life with AI", because it assumes that AI plays a huge role here, which it really does not.

The AI hype is definitely much bigger in the USA - on that part we concur.

I admit I am suspicious of the claim that you know what all Americans, Austrians, or Vietnamese think about anything.

I would argue this says more about how Americans view and treat life as their work instead of treating the world as their life.

> your access to basic rights is intermediated by a corporate job

Lmao. America has worse social welfare than most developed countries, but it's still a heaven compared to most of the world. What you can find in food bank is a feast for billions of people on this planet.

American people are stressed about AI because American people are expensive. Like hella expensive. So the incentive to replace American workers is very strong.

To "decenter [one's] self worth from [one's] job" would presumably require the fact that one's "access to basic rights is intermediated by a corporate job", no? This is a policy problem that needs to be solved by collective action, not a mindset problem that can be solved by personal growth

This isn't true. People in India are worried about AI quite a bit.

For a while my job was part of my identity in the way you describe not because "lol hypercapitalist American" but because I like computers and computers also pay the bills. I was writing software and doing technical stuff from a young age because I enjoyed it. I fell into doing it professionally because it was an obvious path. It didn't help that when you do this older people like it because they can use you as free/cheap labor which an impressionable kid might mistake for actual praise. It turns out I like other stuff too but it's hard to talk to people socially about obscure New Wave bands and continental philosophy and 90s neo-noir films whereas computers and gizmos and apps are a common frame of reference.

I guarantee you that these people exist in other countries too. Not everybody is a tech bro strawman.

This is fantasy land.

Yeah, a rural farmer who’s never exposed to AI except when it made it possible for her to communicate with someone visiting the farm who dint speak the same languages isn’t worried about AI.

But policy makers, technologists, economists, the elite abs other educated people aware of more than the basics of AI are all concerned about its impacts.

Vienna? lol