THE PEOPLE DO NOT YEARN FOR AUTOMATION | Decoder

Today I want to lay out an idea that's been banging around my head for weeks now as we've been reporting on AI and having conversations here on Decoder. I've been calling it software brain, and it's a particular way of seeing the world that fits everything into algorithms and databases and loops of software.

Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Software brain is powerful stuff. It is a way of thinking that basically created our modern world. Marc Andreessen, who is the literal embodiment of software brain, called it in 2011 when he wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal called "Software Is Eating the World." Lately, software thinking has been turbocharged by AI in a way that I think helps explain the enormous gap between how excited the tech industry is about the technology and how much regular people are growing to dislike it. In fact, the pull on this is so strong, I think it's fair to say that a lot of people hate AI, and that Gen Z in particular seems to hate AI more and more the more they encounter it. There's that NBC News poll showing AI with worse favorables than ICE and only a little bit above the war in Iran and Democrats generally. That's with nearly two-thirds of respondents saying they'd used ChatGPT or Copilot in the last month. Quinnipiac just found that over half of Americans think AI will do more harm than good. While more than 80% of people were either very concerned or somewhat concerned about the technology, only 35% of people were excited about it. And poll after poll shows that Gen Z uses AI the most and has the most negative feelings about it. A recent Gallup poll found that only 18% of Gen Z was hopeful about AI, down from an already bad 27% last year. At the same time, anger is growing. 31% of those Gen Z respondents said they feel angry about AI, up from 22% last year. Now, I obviously talk to a lot of tech executives and policy people here on Decoder, and I will tell you, they all know AI isn't popular, and they can all see how that's playing out in real life. Here's Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talking about how the tech industry needs to make the case for the enormous investments it's making in AI.