Nilay Patel is wrong about why people hate AI

24 Apr, 2026

In a recent think-piece on Decoder, Nilay Patel treads a path that explores a dissonance between those that do and do not like AI. It is an excellent read.

Nilay: Everyone in tech understands how much regular people dislike AI. What I think they’re missing is why. They think this is a marketing problem. […]

It feels like someone just needs to say this clearly, so I’m just going to do it. AI doesn’t have a marketing problem. People experience these tools every single day! […]

You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences.

Nilay blames this division of viewpoints on something he calls "Software Brain"—a state of mind where people are so used to breaking everything down into neat chunks of manipulatable data that they forget they cannot make the physical world act like a computer world.

Nilay: So what is software brain? The simplest definition I’ve come up with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code.

This is reminiscent of something Dan Olsen came across during his dissection of NFTs in Line Goes Up—Cryptobros thought that the answer to legal problems was to turn everything into code.

Nilay concludes concludes that the reason people hate AI is because people don't like to be flattened into bits of data.

Nilay: Not everything is a business. Not everything is a loop! The entire human experience cannot be captured in a database. That’s the limit of software brain. That’s why people hate AI. It flattens them.

Regular people don’t see the opportunity to write code as an opportunity at all. The people do not yearn for automation. […]

Even taking the time to consider how much of your life is captured in databases makes people unhappy. No one wants to be surveilled constantly, and especially not in a way that makes tech companies even more powerful.

And while he's right on his individual points, he's wrong in his conclusion.

He's right; people cannot be captured in a database, people feel the encroachment of companies, that people feel that it is icky.

But I don't think people feel flattened as a part of using AI. 99% of people aren't using tools like OpenClaw ¹. They just use AI in a browser window.

People hate AI for reasons that are simply more visceral.

The present is hard and people see a future that is worse as a result of AI.

People see AI as a threat to the very nature of an entry level job—because that is what AI companies keep saying it will do.

Dario Amodei: Entry-level jobs in areas like finance, consulting, tech and many other areas like that —- entry-level white-collar work — I worry that those things are going to be first augmented, but before long replaced by AI systems.

We may indeed — it’s hard to predict the future — but we may indeed have a serious employment crisis on our hands as the pipeline for this early-stage, white-collar work starts to contract and dry up.

— The Street

But it's not just their future. It's the present. It is their lived experience.

People are being laid off and AI is being blamed for those layoffs. People are applying for jobs and being rejected by AI tools. People are told that AI will increase their productivity and being given larger workloads.

And it is that last bit that I want to hone in on. Productivity.

The world is operating at a breakneck speed. We do more in hours than we once did in weeks. Yet none of this is of benefit to the average person. Every tool that is made, every improvement to the speed at which we work, every time saving tool and technique results in everyone being told to do more.

And here we are, being threatened with another advance that promises to revolutionise the workplace.

And it doesn't even work right.

It gets things wrong. It ignores instructions. It threatens the world economy.

And we know what happens when it comes crashing down, who will be holding the bag. Whoever is at the bottom of the ladder gets kicked off first.

Why do we hate AI? Because we recognise it for what it is.

They took what we were told was an attempt at creating a digital consciousness and turned it into a fucking productivity tool.

Not an honest attempt at science. Not a marvel in advances in consciousness. Not a step toward a beautiful future where machines do the work and finally humans get to relax.

We hate AI because it is yet another tool to make humans more productive, not for the common good but to make a line on a graph go up.

It is a tool make us pedal faster, work harder, and eventually suffer regardless of the outcome.