This isn’t just a Seattle thing, but I do think the outsized presence of specific employers there contributes to an outsized negativity around AI.
Look, good engineers just want to do good work. We want to use good tools to do good work, and I was an early proponent of using these tools in ways to help the business function better at PriorCo. But because I was on the wrong team (On-Prem), and because I didn’t use their chatbots constantly (I was already pitching agents before they were a defined thing, I just suck at vocabulary), I was ripe for being thrown out. That built a serious resentment towards the tooling for the actions of shitty humans.
I’m not alone in these feelings of resentment. There’s a lot of us, because instead of trusting engineers to do good work with good tools, a handful of rich fucks decided they knew technology better than the engineers building the fucking things.