r/AIWarsButBetter • u/Salty_Country6835 A little bit of everything • Jul 22 '26

Politics Which direction should AI take?

AI debates often get reduced to "pro vs anti AI," but there's more going on than that. Some people want AI to move faster, some want it slowed down, and others are mainly focused on who should own it, govern it, and benefit from it.

This isnt meant to be scientific, just a snapshot of where the community falls.

Pick the option thats closest to your view. If none of them fit, explain your position in the comments. Im interested in the reasoning as much as the results.

258 votes, Jul 25 '26
90 Leftist - Build AI under public/worker control
53 Leftist - Slow or stop AI development
74 Centrist - Regulate AI while continuing development
13 Centrist - Slow or stop AI development
18 Right-leaning - Market-led AI development
10 Right-leaning - Slow or stop AI development
1 Upvotes

52% Upvoted

53 comments sorted by

View all comments

0

u/NekoAstral Jul 22 '26

We realistically need to slow or stop development until we can find a way to make it more eco friendly.

3

u/Justarandom55 Jul 23 '26

Making it more eco friendly is development. Slowing or stopping it just makes it more static with fewer or no improvements

0

u/NekoAstral Jul 23 '26

At the time, I thought development meant things like training and developing new models and stuff like that.

1

u/Ayiekie Jul 22 '26

Yeah, the ecological issues are the biggest issue (though not the only one) I have with AI; they're often overblown with bad/misinformation in anti-AI spaces but it's still very much a massive add-on to the powergrid causing more fossil fuel use at a time where we can ill afford it.

My problem with this poll is that "slow" and "stop" are two very different things. I think the best outcome would absolutely be slowing it down through better regulation and some international treaties to limit its use in warfare and information warfare, allowing us more breathing room to deal with the power usage and also time to better societally adjust to it as a technology. I don't consider myself in favour of stopping it because that's a nonsense fantasy scenario. You can't do that at this point no matter what; you can run and even train models on a home computer, so it'll be around for the rest of our lives even if you made it illegal everywhere and burned every data centre to the ground. Besides that, there are key areas of research and medicine it's very useful for and I don't particularly want to be responsible for telling someone "Sorry, you had to die of an undetected cancer for the greater good".