I have been listening and thinking deeply about why the artificial intelligence conversation is leaving such a bad taste in my mouth. It is hard to form a thought, let alone vocalize oneself in today’s hostile and noisy environment about not just AI, but the wider Internet, but I figured I’d draw a few lines in the sand on the beach of my little island. I am very confident in the fact that, as many AI believers love to point out, that I will be left behind by the current AI revolution. More precisely, I will stay behind. Meaning, this is where I get off this particular technological train. It is partly my age, but primarily just a difference in the ideology around what the Internet technology is for, and what it isn’t for, particularly when it comes to serving humanity.
Let’s start with the fundamental building blocks of why I am skeptical of AI, which I feel pretty strongly are serious areas of concern. And I am confounded why people I thought were logical, caring, and pragmatic human beings are so willing to overlook, kick the can down the road, and believe that AI will “just fix”.
- Labor - AI Is so clearly being used as a way of shifting power in the labor discussion at this moment, and I am not just talking about perceived employee replacement—-I am talking about the blind desire of business leadership to use AI and automation to replace people even before understanding how it works and what the impacts are.
- Environment - AI uses so much energy and has renewed our appetite for coal and nuclear in a time where we were just beginning to make better choices for the future of our children, but the stupid tractor beam around AI does not at all seem to care about the negative impact of AI in the real world.
- Attribution - There is no respect, and there is even disdain or copyright, authorship, expertise, and any provenance regarding the data and connect being used to train LLMs, something that upends over a century of law that was put in place to protect the artists and creators who are having their works stolen.
- Black Box - Everything is such a black box, and not because it has to, but because it is by design—-the darker and more complex the better the environment is for spinning stories about what is possible, when it is actually all knowable and visible, it is just better to tell the story that it is all a mysterious magical black box.
The first two points confound me. I get that rich people have a labor wet dream they want fulfilled using AI, but the droves of workers who are lining up to the trough to sell the future of their work to a few powerful corporations blows my mind. Reading a few science fiction novels when you were a kid and a belief that you will someday be one of the rich people has immense powers of activating some serious blindness when it comes to seeing the human beings who are working within the machine, or are being ground up by it. The delusional belief that we don’t have to think about the environmental factors because AI will eventually solve it is a new and very powerful version of kicking the can down the road so our kid have to deal with things, is something that leaves me pretty angry with the AI believers.
The first two anger my soul and make AI personally something that doesn’t interest me, but if I was to reduce things down to a pure economic or career based perspective, the last two are what draws the end of the line for my career. I got into this business because APIs like AWS, Google Maps, and Twilio were making systems that were historically off-limits or out of reach to the average developer more accessible. I believed in this wave of APIs because APIs were making things more accessible using low-cost HTTP technology, making things like compute, storage, maps, sms, and other valuable resources that historically only big companies had access to—-were now available to everyday developers. This, dare I say, democratization of digital resources and capabilities is what I believe is the power of Internet technology delivered via simple, low-cost, HTTP-powered APIs. AI is not this. It is the opposite of that.
I am not in the business of developing tools for a few very rich people. Sorry. It doesn’t make me happy. Even with the promise that I will be one of those rich people. Meh. Blah. Sorry, this is not what I was put on this planet for. There is no way that you can argue that AI is a future for humanity at this point. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t doubt that AI will continue, but I am damn sure it won’t be in the business of improving the lives of human beings around me. Sorry. It won’t. Sure, you might be able to point to a handful of ways it will unlock some new knowledge, but at what cost to our collective ability to live and work, and even just breathe the air and drink the water. Sorry, this is where I get off the train. It doesn’t mean I will go away. I won’t. I actually don’t believe that AI will consume everything and change everything in this moment, and APIs will continue to be a needed skill well past when I leave this world. But I refuse to stay on the mainstream technology train if it is team AI.
The language that AI believers are using is the canary in the coal mine for me. They are aggressive and absolute. You MUST do this. You HAVE to do this. AI believers love using very apocalyptic and scary stories to get you to stay on the train. This reeks of authoritarianism to me. I have never been a compliant individual and will always roll my middle finger up in the face of people telling me I have to do something. So here it is. FUCK YOU! I don’t care. I will not be pandering to AI. Like other applications of APIs I will stay aware of what is happening, but I never went too deep on mobile or device applications, so I am happy to keep AI at an arm’s length. Sure, this will hurt my career. But I don’t care. I am not in this for my ego or bank account. I am in this because I am a human being fighting the good fight for all of my other human beings. I am here to keep the machine visible and understandable, and shining a light not the bias and exploitation that occurs in the gears of the machine. This is something that becomes impossible to do in an AI world (this is by design), so I’ll be drawing the line here, and I strong believe that AI as it is currently being sold is a dead end street. Maybe it is just the end of the line for me. So be it. It is a good place to get off this authoritarian clown train car.
