Thoughts on Bots

With so many facets to unpack with this topic, I find it hard to articulate my thoughts exactly about AI (artificial intelligence). I find my feelings around the general concept to be fascination, awe, and cautious. However, my thoughts and feelings towards how we as a society are executing AI to be, like most things under capitalism, to be mostly fucked up.

AI could be, and has been, used to create some amazing things. Advancing scientific and medical research. Increasing our ability to communicate with people who speak different languages. There have even been AI initiatives to study and reduce human’s impact on the environmental. I am not someone who thinks there is no practical application for AI. I just think we are doing it wrong.

I hear a lot about AI tools as a means of productivity. I am immediately leery of this. For employers and managers, the ends usually justify the means. But most are short-sighted. Even if business-types realize that all these tools still need the cautious supervision of experts in their fields using them to prevent problems, it ultimately is ruining apprentice and the ability to hire and train entry-level workers. Whether it’s administration, programming, research, or artistic fields, you see the same tools gobbling up the “easier” work that would be done by junior employees.

Even if you are on board with the productivity focused mindset, AI is ruining our ability to learn and achieve mastery. I have seen that some specialized tools enable skilled people to get things done 10x, but what happens if the tool isn’t available? We are not machines and if we don’t use our tools, they will get dull. Personally, as I am still feel strongly in the learning stage of my programming career, I want to experience struggle and research the tools I’m working with to achieve understanding. I don’t want shortcuts to give my CEO an even larger slice of the pie. There is an alarming reliance on chatbots and AI tools causes people to lose the ability to think for themselves, and creates para-social relationships that can exacerbate disordered thinking. The long term effects are far from known.

The straw for me is the absolutely horrendous environmental and social impact we are already seeing AI, specifically the companies that are developing AI, lay waste upon the world. All these AI tools run off of data centers that ruin local ecosystems, drive up utility costs for people in the area, have devastating health effects on those living nearby, and pollute natural resources.

For all these reasons, I just can’t get on board the hype train. AI, used thoughtfully, could help us solve the issues facing the world today. We could solve environmental issues, make leaps in science and medicine, advance technology, and maybe help create equality by resource distribution. But instead we have techno-fascists, wealth concentration, continued division of the have and have nots, environmental crisis, and AI slop everywhere. I want to have hope for the future, but it seems grim. To quote an excellent line from a silly movie, “Well, wish in one hand, shit in the other one and see which one fills up first”.