Many people dislike AI

AI is unpopular. This is not understood well enough in the software world. (By contrast, employees at big tech companies, for example, tend to be very well aware that a lot of people don't like big tech companies.) This article by Nilay Patel has become a locus for discussion of this. So, here is the excellent John Gruber discussing the subject. I'd factor Patel's article into two main claims: AI is really unpopular; This is because AI makes the world more software-y, which you only like if you have "software brain," which is not normal. I'd say that the first of these is correct (see Patel's evidence) but the second is incorrect, for a few reasons: Ordinary citizens are more "software-brained"--that is, disposed and willing to see the world in terms of databases and algorithms--than Patel says. Dating apps are completely mainstream.1 People complain about them, but their specific complaint tends not to be that a pool of potential partners is being represented as software-apt data.…