As someone who has worked in IT for… well, almost 30 years now, I have generally embraced new technology as it arrives. Certainly there have been trends in the industry that I have not been enthusiastic about at all, such as the domination of the software market by subscription models which require you to pay a monthly or a yearly fee. That trend has also led to software makers not selling software on a CD anymore, and that led to computer makers not putting CD-ROM drives in computers anymore. I am not a fan. I also dislike the trend that makes devices smaller and thinner at the cost of said devices not having 3.5 mm headphone jacks or ethernet ports or even many ports at all. It means that to connect things that used to be quite standard (like a printer, or a network cable) you now have to buy an adapter or a dock of some sort (unless it’s Bluetooth or wireless). And that’s annoying to me.
But the hands-down worst thing (in my opinion) that the technology industry has embraced in recent years is AI, or as the orange moron in the White House and his sycophants like to call it, SI [I don’t particularly care what he calls it and so I will continue to call it AI and risk the ire of Trump and MAGA everywhere]. There are a lot of reasons I dislike AI: it has been vastly oversold to the public in terms of what it can actually do accurately; it is costing a truly gigantic amount of money and so far has not shown much return-on-investment (in fact it seems to have all the makings of a big financial bubble); the technology is supposed to put a lot of people out of work, and many companies are already using AI as an excuse to trim their workforce; far too many people in the industry are pushing uses of the technology out without thinking of the constitutional, ethical, and legal implications of what it does (not to mention them not having any real plans to deal with the rapidly mounting instances of misuse of the technology); and finally, the tech CEOs and billionaires pushing all this absolutely DO NOT have the best intentions towards democratic societies, civilization, and the overwhelming majority of the human race. They are out for themselves and don’t care about democracy. They want to accumulate as much money and power as possible before everything falls apart. So no wonder they have embraced Trump so quickly. The speed at which data centers and AI-based surveillance technology is being pushed out in the United States should absolutely be cause for alarm, and not just because they cause a host of environmental problems as well as consume obscene amounts of electricity and fresh water. They also play a huge role in the domination of cultural and societal narratives on media and social media. That’s why some people freaked out so much when Ukraine destroyed Russian data centers. The attacks showed that much of the traffic on social media (and probably millions of Elon’s followers, for example) are actually bots. Traffic and number of followers determine things like ad revenue for social media platforms. The guy who used to go on and on about how he wanted to get rid of all the bots on the social media platform he wanted to buy actually benefits from millions of bot accounts on his platform because they pay monthly subscription fees to get blue checkmarks and as long as he gets paid and they drive the messages that he agrees with (and they most certainly do) he won’t do anything about them.
Also, AI has become such a huge part of surveillance technology that the cameras that use AI to help identify license plates (known as ALPR or ANPR cameras generally) have inspired a whole new social movement that is very anti-surveillance state: websites (such as deflock.org) dedicated to showing you exactly where the cameras are located; helpful instructions on how to fight the companies trying to put up the cameras in your community; some folks are just cutting all the cameras in their community down; some people are using expandable foam insulation to disable the cameras without even having to remove them; some people make signs with very long poles to block the cameras. It’s fascinating to see the creativity as well as the fact that people are all across the ideological spectrum in their opposition to the cameras.
But despite this encouraging collective effort against AI surveillance, some of the kids are not alright. There seems to be a growing trend in which young people are using AI for virtually anything and everything. And their parents, for the most part, have no idea what their kids are doing with AI. Kelly and I personally overheard a conversation in our little Vermont town between a parent and their tween-aged kid in which the kid insisted that AI was their friend. Kids, at least broadly, do not have the ability to determine the difference between real emotions and the emotions simulated by a chatbot. They don’t have the experience and judgment to question the answers AI gives them. And they certainly don’t realize that chatbots are basically intended to agree with you all the time because the designers made them that way to encourage more use. So AI will tell you that you are right even when it comes to encouraging destructive or suicidal behavior. Even AI bots specifically designed for mental health purposes have failed when dealing with suicidal users. Parents of tweens and teenagers who become emotionally dependent on AI bots, as well as those with younger kids should try to be wary and informed when it comes to AI and their kids’ interactions with it.
So if you want to use AI to do your homework for you, or if you want to hand your creative impulses over to it and let it do all your writing and thinking for you, be my guest, but don’t expect me to support you by enthusiastically embracing the technology and the slop that it generates as “literature” or “art” or anything of the sort. I think it’s crap. And I think that techbro billionaires would LOVE to not have to worry about paying salaries and benefits to human beings if they could just buy robots or AI tokens to do all the work instead. But I will keep insisting that my books and music and movies be made by people, and I hope society will ultimately agree with me.
-Geoff
