Because I use the Tor browser when I go to duck.ai, by my count that means I’m wearing at least four condoms when I use AI. I feel pretty confident that I won’t catch the AI virus, but you can never be too sure (or too safe).
Before I go any further, I’m acutely aware that there are many, many people who are forced to use AI at work and others who have good reasons why they use AI or even work for an AI company. Most of us don’t have the extraordinary wealth of those who are desperately trying to make us believe that AI is inevitable and necessary, and we have mortgages and rent and bills to pay that influence our decisions.
Therefore, I’m not including them in my claim. I’m specifically talking about the enthusiastic AI boosters who are doing the PR work of the 1%. That is the key.
AI advocacy is actively harming society, and the people that are doing it are displaying an almost pathological level of indifference. I’d argue that whether they do so knowingly or unknowingly is both condemnable – the former shows a callousness to anything outside of self, and the latter demonstrates a disturbing incuriousness that is indefensible.
I’ll expand upon all of this in the sections that follow, but the points largely overlap, and it is difficult to clearly delineate one from another. In my view, this supports and strengthens my overall claim.
First, I’d like to briefly propose the groundwork that was necessary to be laid before mass adoption of AI could become both palatable and realistic.
We have been primed to prioritize and demand convenience over everything else
There is a surety in life that is demonstrated over and over again: given the option, humans will choose convenience over inconvenience. They do this even when shown the negative consequences of this surrender. Taking the easy way out and cutting corners over hard work and dedication is even celebrated and lauded in our present culture.
The latest culmination of this has been the massive adoption of AI. Some programmers, especially those who have just started their career, may legitimately claim that it is not worth spending years, if not decades, learning a subject (or subjects) deeply when they see that instead they can just ask a model (and that behavior is then rewarded). By redefining what “value” means to be profit-motivated, young programmers can reasonably wonder if it is even in their best interests to focus on and commit to intellectual study and devotion to deeply challenging subjects. That’s not where the value is.
Given the demotivating conditions we find ourselves in, it certainly is more convenient to ask an LLM than it is to put in the time to become a subject-matter expert. A sensible counter to that would be that the answer you’re given could be wrong, but how would you know? Increasingly, it seems that this is a concern that is not seen as a priority, and as a good employee and team player, it is no longer a priority to you.
The more that companies use AI, the more they are dependent upon the whims of a few AI companies. First, they were locked into a cloud company, and now they’ve also chosen vendor lock-in to an AI company. This has already shown itself to be an incredibly short-sighted and poor decision, as demonstrated recently by Claude going offline with large numbers of users affected. This is so idiotic it is beyond belief; “engineers”, now having to rely upon an agent to do even the most basic tasks, found themselves unable to get any work done because their AI company of choice shit the bed. They are now unable to work locally, thanks to the convenience of the cloud.
Would the Snowden disclosures even make an impact today?
We have been primed to distrust expertise
America has always had a dark underbelly of anti-intellectualism. This has been brutally accelerated by the current administration in the United States. Political candidates and appointees and jurists are extremely unqualified for the office for which they are running and are elected or appointed regardless. Things that worked and were taken for granted begin to break, and there is no Plan B. When this type of dystopian leadership exists at the top, it will have an influence on everything below it.
Given this acceptance and embrace of a distrust of and outright mockery of expertise from the top down, it is no wonder that a technology such as AI would be massively adopted. In the past, I believe there would have been more critical thinking applied and more questions asked of the self-empowered few that have unleashed AI on us. Actually, given how toothless the U.S. media is, perhaps not.
The more ready we are to distrust expertise, the more easily we will be beguiled and bamboozled by bullshit. We become easily gullible and will fall for anything. Without the ability to rely on critical thinking and common sense, we are desperate to embrace any silver bullet.
Senior programmers aren’t who they think they are
Something that I’d like to address that doesn’t seem to get challenged are the programmers who claim to be “concerned” with AI when it comes to more junior programmers but aren’t worried about their own use, ostensibly because they have arrived.
There aren’t a lot of truisms in life, but one I can get behind is that you don’t know what you don’t know. Do you really believe that you have expert-level knowledge in all the areas of the code that has been generated by a model? You may believe that “you’re all good” just reviewing the sloppy output of AI, but your learning and growth will atrophy just as surely as anyone else who relies on AI to produce code. Reviewing code is just not enough. You need to write it.
There are many anecdotal cautionary tales of programmers losing their skills through over-reliance on AI. This is a real problem fueled by over-confidence in one’s own skillset.
Moreover, there is a responsibility to mentor and train the younger generation. This is now in danger, because these overconfident senior programmers are losing their skills with every passing day that they outsource their brains to AI.
We need serious programmers. Serious programmers are people who care about the importance of understanding what they produce and its tradeoffs. People who are interested in continuing to learn and getting better at what they love. People who care about passing on that hard-earned knowledge to a younger generation. People who realize that knowledge is not a destination.
AI cheerleading is a moral failing
Even if AI gets to the point of generating flawless code – code that never breaks, is security-minded and is context-aware of the rest of the codebase – I still say “so what”? Who cares? What is the benefit to you of generating something that you haven’t written? Can you feel a sense of pride in that? How can you know what it does? Maybe you now think you’re a “10x engineer”, but that questionable “productivity” is merely lining the pockets of other people who are just looking to automate your job anyway. Are they paying you a 10x salary?
Speaking of salaries, there are many people who are not receiving one, through no fault of their own. Many of these job losses have been directly attributed to AI (to be fair, many dispute this, instead blaming the job cuts as a “correction” on the over-zealous hiring practices seen during COVID). This makes this enthusiastic AI advocacy even more gross and unwholesome.
There are many more terrible reasons why AI should not be used. AI boosters know these reasons and boost anyway. This should be considered unacceptable considering the harm that is inflicted upon all of us, these short-sighted people included.
Not using AI is a public good. It supports:
- working people
- young people looking for their first jobs
- education
As well as other areas that are important but not mentioned in this article:
- the environment
- mental health
- privacy
Conclusion
You’d have to be an unserious person with a weak moral compass to choose AI advocacy as its promotion inflicts great harm on society – whether through cynical ambition and greed or incurious ignorance. Perhaps, these boosters were not using the proper protection when using AI, and, as a result, we’re now subjected to their endless, predictable and boring hot takes. Either way, they should not be seen as authorities but as shameless promoters for the ultra-wealthy whose ranks they hope to join at the expense of the rest of us.
To be fair, I believe that programmers themselves and engineering departments are partially to blame for the subservient position in which we find ourselves. For instance, it’s a problem when the interests of engineering seem to align with those of the business interests most of the time. There should be a certain amount of friction between departments, as they generally have different priorities. This is a healthy thing and can lead to discussions that help strengthen the company overall.
But, more on that in a future article.
Incidentally, I did take the time to use OpenCode a bit and even created my own agent, agent-pete. I thought it would make sense to build a project that uses at least some of the popular features of agents and to code it myself. It is, after all, important to investigate the other side of one’s argument and be open to change, and I felt the best way to do that was to get my hands dirty.
Even though I did learn more about the tools that people are using to build their million-dollar companies, I came away from it feeling like I had wasted my time and that I should have spent it doing something useful, like learning a new language or learning something new about the Linux kernel. After all, as there is so much cool stuff to learn about programming and systems, and a single lifetime just isn’t enough time to learn deeply about all of the things that interest me.