AI Has Lots of People Digging Out Their iPods

A recent Pew Research report found that 40 percent of Americans expect AI to negatively impact society, compared with 16 percent who predict a positive impact. Almost two-thirds, or 63 percent, say AI is advancing too quickly.

The angst doesn’t stop there. Americans spend more than four hours each day on their phones, and a lot of them don’t like it. The internet teems with tips and tricks to help people distance themselves from their devices (put your phone in grayscale; charge it in another room) or even ditch their smartphones altogether. About 169,000 people visit a Reddit community dedicated to digital minimalism each week.

Analyst Sara Watson ’07 has written in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Slate, and other publications about bending the arc of technology from individual convenience toward the collective good. In this conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Watson, who was a fellow and affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society from 2013 to 2019, shares insights on the “tech-lash” and how it might unfold.

What is behind the resistance to AI?

People are taking issue with the lack of consent. I’m seeing more of a discussion about, “I’m not agreeing to use this thing, but it’s being introduced to all my interfaces, software upgrades, all my devices, without demand for it.”

Yes, the AI backlash has to do with concerns about work, particularly for new graduates. But it goes beyond that: The vision of the future being pushed by tech moguls is not necessarily a vision we’ve all bought into. What we’re seeing is resistance to that vision of the future — the sense that we’re not represented in that future, and we’re searching for means of resisting the inevitability framing and reasserting our own visions of the future.

I think that’s why you’re seeing the resistance to data centers in particular: It’s the most material instantiation of this technological shift showing up in our communities. There is concern about environmental impacts — water, energy use, noise pollution — mixed with a bit of NIMBYism. But data center resistance is operating on a town-by-town scale of community organizing that can be impactful in the absence of state or federal regulations.

How does the AI backlash fit into the history of resistance to new technologies?

When Victorian railroads were introduced, they caused nausea and “railway neurosis.” I also look back to film history: Early films replicated the proscenium arch, teaching us how we were supposed to watch films as a theatrical audience. Designers have always understood that we need familiar cues to learn to relate to new interfaces and media.

All technologies have their growing pains, but the Intel researcher Genevieve Bell says that moral panics surface when technologies change our relationship to time, space, and each other. An obvious parallel is the Luddite movement. But I always remind people the Luddites weren’t resisting the textile machines themselves: They were resisting the loss of jobs, and the loss of social support that came with automation.

Beyond AI, what trends are you paying attention to in the contemporary resistance to tech?

“I’m noticing a resurgence in interest in going offline, ‘grandma hobbies’ like knitting or crochet.”