A lot of people say they hate AI right now. I hear it constantly in comments, in conversations, in headlines. And I understand it. I'm not here to tell you that you're wrong. But I want to try something a little different with this video. Instead of telling you what to think about AI, I'm going to lay out some distinctions, walk through some context, and ask you a series of questions. By the end, I'd like you to tell me in the comments where your anger actually sits. because I think the answer might be more specific and more useful than just I hate AI. I'm El. I have a PhD in computer science and I analyze AI developments to understand what actually is happening beneath all of this hype. Let's start with an analogy. Nobody says I hate medicine. Medicine is a branch of science that has extended human life expectancy, eradicated smallpox, made child birth survivable, and given people years with their families they wouldn't otherwise have had. Medicine as a discipline is one of humanity's greatest achievements. And yet, if you're an American who has ever broken a bone, god forbid, and received a $40,000 hospital bill, or had to choose between filling a prescription and paying rent, or watched an insurance company deny a claim for a procedure your doctor said you needed. You might have some very strong feelings about the medical system. You might be furious about drug pricing, about insurance gatekeeping, about pharmaceutical companies pushing medications for profit. Those are completely valid feelings, but you're not angry at medicine. You're angry at a set of economic structures, corporate incentives, and policy failures that have turned a life-saving science into a source of financial terror. You hate the system, not the science.

I think something very similar is happening with AI, and I want to carefully pull it apart in this video. Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science. It has been around in various forms since the 1950s and the vast majority of what it does has absolutely nothing to do with chatbots generated images or large language models. Consider Alphafold developed by Google DeepMind solved a problem that had stumped biologists for 50 years predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences. This used to take a year or more of painstaking experimental work per protein. Alphold did it for essentially every known protein. The implications for drug discovery are enormous. Research linked to AlphaFold is twice as likely to be cited in clinical articles as typical structural biology work and significantly more likely to appear in patents. It won the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry. This is AI. It has nothing to do with writing your emails for you. In cancer imaging, AI tools like MIT's MRAI can predict breast cancer risk up to five years in advance, giving clinicians time to intervene earlier. Across multiple cancer types, AI diagnostic systems have consistently matched or surpassed clinician accuracy in detecting tumors from medical images. AI is being used for realtime speech to text for deaf and heart of hearing communities. It's being used in climate modeling, material science, agricultural yield prediction, earthquake early warning systems, and dozens of other domains where the words large language models have never been uttered. When someone says, "I hate AI," I want to just gently ask, "Do you hate protein folding research? Do you hate early cancer detection? Do you hate accessibility tools for people with disabilities?" You probably don't. So, what is it specifically that you hate? Hold that question. I'm going to come back to it.

I think to understand why AI generates the level of fear and anger it does right now, you have to understand the world it arrived into, because AI didn't land in a vacuum it landed in this economy. Since 1985, US median household income has risen roughly 255% in nominal terms, but median house prices have surged over 415%. The ratio of home price to actual income has gone from about 3.1 to a nearrecord 5.1. The median age of a firsttime home buyer has risen from 29 in the 1980s to 40 years old today. As of 2026, 65% of American households cannot afford a newly built medianpriced home. In some states, that figure is over 80%. You don't need me to tell you what this feels like. We're all living it together. The gap between what people earn and what life costs has been widening for 40 years. And for most people, there is very little margin left. Now, imagine you're in that position, stretched, precarious, one bad month away from real trouble. And somebody tells you that a new powerful technology is about to reshape the labor market. It doesn't matter how nuanced the explanation is or what I say in a video. It doesn't matter if the technology has extraordinary potential or that it might cure cancer. What you hear is another thing that might take away the ground that I'm standing on yet again. And that fear, my friends, is completely rational. Not because AI is inherently threatening, but because the economic environment we're all living in has made any major disruption feel existential. Think about when smartphones arrived, right? The iPhone launched back in 2007. It was genuinely disruptive. It transformed entire industries, contributed to the decline of print media, restructured retail, killed companies that couldn't adapt. But the dominant public reaction was curiosity, even excitement a little bit. Nobody was marching in the streets against smartphones. And that's not because smartphones were less disruptive than AI. It's because they arrived in a moment when most people still felt enough economic stability to absorb the change with interest rather than dread. The ground felt solid enough to stand on while the world shifted. AI arrived when it doesn't. So here's my first question for you. When you feel anger or fear about AI, is it directed at the technology itself, at the mathematics, the research, the engineering, or is it directed at the fact that we exist in an economic environment where any significant change feels like it could be the one thing that finally breaks you? Because those are different problems and they have very different solutions.

Now, there is a place where the medicine analogy breaks down. And I think it's important to be honest about that. With medicine, you generally choose to engage with the system. You go to the doctor when you're unwell. Nobody forces you to take a medication you don't want. But AI is being pushed onto people whether they ask for it or not. Microsoft has embedded C-Pilot into virtually every product it sells. Google has inserted AI generated summaries at the top of search results, often at the expense of the quality people relied on. Adobe trained generative AI models on creators' work under terms of service that many artists felt they never meaningfully consented to. In workplaces across every sector, employees are being told to use AI tools not asked told regardless of whether those tools are appropriate, accurate, or welcome. This is the pharmaceutical company pushing unnecessary prescriptions version of the analogy. It is not medicine's fault, but it is the fault of specific companies making specific decisions to prioritize adoption metrics and quarterly earnings over whether their product is actually wanted or helpful. And I think this is where a very significant and very legitimate portion of the anger sits not at AI the science but at AI the product being forced into every surface of our digital lives by corporations that have decided we don't get a choice.

There are also serious specific technical objections to how AI is being built. Questions of consent, who gave permissions for creative work to be used as training data? Questions of ownership, who profits when an AI model generates something derived from an artist style? Questions of accuracy, what happens when AI systems produce confident, plausible nonsense in highstakes context like medicine, law, or journalism? These are real problems. They are legal, ethical, and technical problems. We've covered some of them in depth in a previous video that I'm going to link as well. And they deserve serious treatment, not dismissal. But notice, none of these are objections to AI as a field of research. They are objections to specific practices by specific companies. The distinction matters because it changes where you aim your energy. So here's my second question. Is your frustration directed at the existence of artificial intelligence as a technology or at the way specific corporations are building, deploying, and monetizing AI products because one of those is a force of nature at this point. The other is a set of decisions being made by people who could make different choices.

I want to close this video with something a little more philosophical because I think the good versus bad framing that dominates the AI conversation is actually part of the problem. I don't think AI is good or bad. I'm not even sure those are useful categories. In life, there are only objectives, things we're trying to achieve, and there are things that help us meet those objectives and things that hinder us. AI could be either. It depends entirely on the systems around it. In a society with strong labor protections, meaningful safety nets, and genuine regulatory frameworks, a powerful new technology is an opportunity. People can afford to be curious. They can retrain, adapt, explore because the floor beneath them isn't going to disappear if they stumble. In a society where most people are one missed paycheck away from a crisis, where housing consumes half our income, where people have to choose between having shelter or children, where the social contract feels like it's been quietly shredded over four decades. That same technology feels like a threat, not because it is one, but because we can't afford for it to be one. And nobody in a position of power has given us any reason to believe they'll make sure that it isn't. The anger is real. The fear is real. I'm not here to talk anyone out of those feelings. I am just asking you to be precise about where you aim them. Because I hate AI is a sentence that doesn't have a useful response. But I hate that there is no regulatory framework for how AI products use my data. Or I hate that my employer is replacing functional tools with halfbaked AI alternatives. or I hate that I live in an economy so precarious that any disruption feels like a death sentence. Those are sentences that point toward actual solutions. Regulation, labor protections, corporate accountability, economic reform, things that can be demanded, organized around, voted for. AI as a field of science isn't going anywhere. It's been around for 70 years and it's not going to stop because people are angry on the internet. But the conditions around it, the economic procarity, the corporate recklessness, the regulatory vacuum, those are choices. They were made by people and they can be unmade by people. So you've heard the distinctions, the science versus the products, the technology versus the economic context, the legitimate technical objections versus the ambient dread. Where does your anger actually sit? I generally love to know. Tell me in the comments below. If you want to see the hard data behind why people feel the way they do, the water extraction, the noise pollution, the billions being charged to communities that never ask for any of this, I'd recommend my video documenting this AI backlash. The link is in the description below. Thank you all so much for watching. Subscribe and I'll see you all in the next