I don’t like anything about AI. In fact, I think it’s unnecessary and a complete waste of time. Others with similar views as mine have hedged a bit and added that well, it’s more proper to view it as another useful tool in the toolbox rather than as a seismic change in the way we live and work. Maybe, if the toolbox was dumb.
Any serious person with a modicum of common sense wouldn’t touch AI with a 10-foot stick. There are many, many reasons that the technology is terrible, and that’s not even taking account its impact on technology. In my view, it’s also a moral issue, especially in light of how it effects the environment and how it can both keep people in poverty (no jobs) and impoverish countless others (no jobs).
Here is a small list of the insidious repercussions of AI, any one of which should be a dealbreaker. In no order of importance, because they are all important, AI has had an objectively negative impact on:
- the environment
- the economy
- jobs
- education
- mental heath
- increasing misinformation and disinformation
- ceding control to the oligarchy
In fairness, I should prevent the other side of the argument. It makes people more “productive”, which is an incredibly weak and ineffectual argument.
Productive for who? You think you are a 10x engineer now, are you also now taking home 10x the pay? Is that the productivity boost? Or, is it that you’re producing more lines of code, which we’ve known for decades is a terrible metric, so many in fact that now you can no longer adequately review it?
Again, any serious person should find the adoption of AI, especially on a massive scale such as we see in the United States, as laughable and, well, very unserious.
Now, children, here are some of my claims:
AI is popular because we live in a society that doesn’t value experts and deep knowledge.
America has always had an underbelly of anti-intellectualism. In our present era, it has been grotesquely
- Engineering departments ceded too much ground to business interests.
- This in turn helped to turn programmers into gooey, pliant, formless shells of themselves.
- Engineering has been captured by moneyed interests. Only things that bring “value” are worth investing in.
Discuss.
Conclusion
I must admit that there is one positive thing about AI. It’s exposed all of the boys and girls (probably mostly boys) that are just wild about AI. I mean, they are really over the moon about it.
It used to be much more difficult to try and figure out whose these people are. But, like MAGA hats have done, they’ve willingly crawled out of their little holes and told they rest of us who they are. Let’s not let them forget it.