Cultural Anxiety and Artificial Intelligence

Why everyone’s mad at AI: It’s not about jobs, it’s about who gets to be human

Photo by José Martín Ramírez Carrasco on Unsplash

It washed over the world like a giant digital tsunami. Some people sat in stunned silence; they’re jobs would soon be gone. Others leaped in the air, a new dawn for humanity was here, a life of luxury was ahead. Others prophesied the end of humanity. Shareholders salivated and celebrated limitless wealth. Militaries lit up their war games folks. Pundits pranced around on stages and podcasts, the new digital soothsayers wrapped in silicon glitter. Artificial Intelligence was here.

We are now, just a few years later, entering a period of what we might call mass cultural anxiety over AI and the role we want it to play in society. Right now, culture is not amused. At a societal level, AI is largely misunderstood. This is normal for such technologies. But the major AI companies and Tech Giants didn’t really help matters either. Arguably making this cultural anxiety worse.

Below, I take a look at the unfolding cultural anxiety and consider the possible outcomes. AI can do a lot of great things for humanity. When culture decides how to accept and run it.

In the 18th when the first hot air balloon was launched over Paris, the inventor proclaimed we would, in but a short time, be taking balloon rides to the moon. By the 1970’s, scientists stated that with nuclear energy, we would soon see an almost zero cost supply of endless energy. In the 90’s with the rise of information technology, we would see the paperless office. We got more paper.

There is even a law around technologies emerging into society. Amara’s Law states that we tend to overestimate the short term impact of technologies and underestimate the long term impacts. We also know that all technologies are a double-edged sword and have unintended consequences.

Twitter was originally created to be a messaging platform between paramedics in an ambulance and the ER staff. We all know how that’s turned out. Bell invented the telephone to share opera music. Now we all carry one with us everywhere.

How The AI Companies Got It Wrong

Shortly after the launch of ChatGPT, Microsoft included it in their Bing search engine and then across a number of products in their suite. Quiet brilliantly calling it Copilot. The cultural response was to call it the new Clippy of the AI age. Google launched a whole slew of Ai products that just left people confused. Apple? Well, Apple did what they do; wait. Smart.

Within months, the AI heat was running full throttle. Suddenly the latest updates to most every software had some sort of AI label or button. No option to hide them or turn them off. AI was here, whether you liked it or not. Not to be outdone, consumer products figured it was a money-making time, of course everyone wanted AI in their toothbrush, right?

What these AI platform companies and Tech Giants fundamentally misunderstood is cultural diffusion patterns. Which is how an emerging technology actually diffuses into society for acceptance. Instead we ended up with some form of technological colonialism. AI was thrust on society so hard and so fast there was no time for cultural preparation or consent.

Perhaps these tech companies thought Generative AI (ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney et al), was another iPhone moment. If so, they might somewhat be forgiven for their misunderstanding.

One of the ways society adapt to new technologies is what is called “bricolage” (Claude Lévis-Strauss), where we incorporate these new tools into our existing symbolic systems. The iPhone was successful because it was easily understood where and how it could be used in society. This wasn’t the case with Generative AI. It was thrust into the world as an undifferentiated mass.

Simply put, it was just too much, too fast. It didn’t help that layered over top of this forced adoption was the narrative of the Tech Giants and AI platform CEOs and the gaggle of tech hype supplicants that gather around them.

The common message was that any knowledge job, from lawyers and doctors to insurance claims adjusters were going to lose their jobs. Fast. Not in the trades or blue collar? You’re done for. Then the were the canaries in the coal mine. Their narrative? AI will destroy humanity as a species and that too, was going to be very soon. Neither was, or is, entirely right, or wrong. The reality is, we just don’t know.

But all of this has been enough to result in today’s cultural anxiety around AI. And it may well end up hurting the development of AI more than helping it.

Human societies don’t much like having anything forced upon them or told that everything they know is about to be gone and humans are irrelevant. And then they’re surprised at the cultural backlash.

The Symptoms of Cultural Anxiety With Artificial Intelligence

There isn’t a massive backlash against AI, nor is this about to be the end of AI, either. And it’s important to remember that “Artificial Intelligence” is an umbrella term for a whole suite of tools. Most consumers only see tools like ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot (not realising even that Copilot is ChatGPT with a wrapper).

When Duolingo announced it was replacing human educators for their language training software there was a massive outmigration of customers who found it offensive. So much so that Duolingo changed its policies and stated humans would remain.

One symptom that’s prevalent is humans writing in ways that AIs don’t do, such as twists of grammar, imperfect spelling and rejecting things like the use of the em dash. Others posting about AI slop and how they reject anything they perceive as AI slop.

In industry we see platforms like Cloudflare, which hosts a ton of internet content, now starting to charge a royalty fee for any AI crawlers scraping content off sites and services they support. Other such companies may well follow.

Copyright lawsuits are many, although Anthropic just had a significant win. Governments in various countries are struggling with how much to regulate while the US government is about to bring in a law that none of the States can regulate AI for a decade.

Consumer products, such as the AI toothbrush haven’t fared well in the market, largely being rejected. If a consumer market doesn’t trust or understand a technology, they will tend to shy away from any products associated with it.

There are cases around mental health impacts where some blame Ai chatbots for increasing their depression and one family claiming a member committed suicide due to an AI chatbot. The evidence is thin, but growing, on the downsides of AI and mental health. Yet some claim a preference and better mental health outcomes with AI chatbots.

So What’s Next With Culture and Artificial Intelligence?

I would like to know definitively because then I’d become rather wealthy. The truth is we can’t know for sure, but we can look at how we understand culture and history to get some idea of how things will go.

One thing I and many others are quite certain of is that while AI tools will replace some jobs, it won’t replace them all and likely others will be created. It’s not going to be all AI and all robots by 2030 either.

Much will depend on how culture chooses to adapt to and then, as it has before, ultimately shape the technology to its desires. It’s important to note that most of the predictions of an AI utopia or dystopia come out of Silicon Valley and Western European thinking. Asian and European approaches and forecasts are quite different.

People are increasingly engaging with chatbots, often not even thinking or realising that they’re using AI. They’re forming parasocial relationships with these bots and even AI generated influencers on social media platforms. Gen Z to Gen Alpha are more culturally comfortable with these tools and their applications. For now. They risk becoming a fad or trend and could easily fizzle out.

For the most part, cultures around the world are just trying to make sense of what AI is and what it means to us. In large part because it is a powerful technology and one that we realise can be, like us, storytellers. Subconscious, that unnerves us a bit.