The disparity between the trillions spent fueling AI and the distaste of the people meant to adopt it has grown into a chasm. Only 16% of Americans believe AI will have a positive impact on society over the next 20 years, according to a recent survey conducted by Pew, while 40% expect the opposite.
There’s a number of reasons people detest AI—the data centers are disruptive, it gobbles up water—but by far the most salient one is that it could take jobs. Robert Shiller, a Nobel economist, worries that that panic could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In a guest essay in The New York Times on June 22 headlined “This Doommaxxing Has Got to Stop,” the Yale economist expanded on his Nobel-prize winning work on how markets misprice risk. He’s now interested in the cause of that mispricing, and the cause, he argued, is about narrative, the stories people tell each other about where the economy is headed.
