Arvind Narayanan has spent years puncturing Silicon Valley’s grandest claims about artificial intelligence. The Princeton computer-science professor co-wrote AI Snake Oil, a book that challenges the notion that algorithms can reliably predict who will be a good employee, which patients will get sick, or who might commit crimes. He has also pushed back on the idea that generative AI is about to eliminate vast swaths of white-collar work, calling work something like a “sandwich” whose bun is growing even as the meat shrinks.
But Narayanan does not dismiss the public’s mounting hostility toward AI. He thinks the backlash is real, understandable—and far more complicated than any one thing. It’s a coalition of different fears, he said: “many different kinds of anxieties have all kind of pushed together into one sort of generalized opposition to AI.”
