Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

Paul Krugman argues that public hostility toward AI—evidenced by booed commencement speeches and Pew surveys showing net-negative sentiment—breaks from the historically optimistic American response to new tech. He attributes the backlash to AI companies' own apocalyptic marketing, forced adoption at work and in consumer products like Google search, visible datacenter costs, eroded trust in tech, and AI's association with oligarchic wealth concentration.

Teaching:
• Contrast forced adoption of AI with the voluntary, embodied choice students make stepping onto the mat—practice is a domain they actually consent to
• Use this as a class theme on attention sovereignty: what tools do you let mediate your nervous system, and which ones do you opt out of
• Coach students who are AI-fatigued at work to treat the shala as a deliberate analog interval, not another optimization layer
• Frame Mysore self-practice as the opposite of an LLM autocomplete—you have to generate the next breath yourself

Writing seeds:
• Essay: Enshittification vs. Practice—why systems that extract trust collapse, and why a daily method doesn't
• Shala Daily post on consent and adoption: the difference between a teacher offering an adjustment and a platform shipping a feature you didn't ask for
• Ashtanga.tech piece on functional literacy as the human counter-skill to apocalyptic productivity narratives
• Short essay: 'The Datacenter and the Body'—both are infrastructure, only one is yours

Idea map:
• Systems literacy means seeing who profits from your adoption curve, whether it's an AI vendor or a yoga lineage
• Connects to MJH's recurring critique of optimization culture: practice as method resists being sold as transformation
• Embodiment as the last domain of opt-in: trust is built through repetition and consent, not forced rollout
• Echoes his attention work—what we hate is often what was imposed without our noticing the imposition

Source: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-does-everyone-hate-ai