Silicon Valley has always been big on producing technological solutions in search of a problem. Hell, I’d say this is something baked into the DNA of digital technology and the transformations that have come with it. However, the current crop of artificial intelligence believers are beyond desperate to tell you about the problem they have solved with their AI solution. I am really curious why people are so craven, obsessed, and driven to be the champion for artificial intelligence, which honestly has completely turned me off of even fucking touching anything artificial intelligence. As always I want to write my way forward towards more of an understanding of why people want this AI moment so badly.
Money
The most obvious one is that with the financialization of everything in our lives that greed is why people believe. They believe that artificial intelligence is the key to them getting rich, and like blockchain and other technological hustles AI is the magic. From CEOs down to the average tech worker, they see AI as the key to them being rich beyond their wildest dreams and will use it to get there at all costs.
Power
Rich people who already have enough money see AI as the way to accumulate more power from the competition, from the government, from those damn workers they need to produce their products and services. AI sorts everything into meaningful buckets that help you separate friends and enemies, what you see as the good from the bad, and provides unlimited unaccountability sinks for you to hide behind.
Crowd
Many people just follow the crowd. They don’t have a mind of their own and just go wherever the people around them are going. Once the ground gets moving and all your friends and coworkers are headed in that direction—you head in that direction. I think it is comfortable for a lot of people to just follow the crowd as it will take having your own identity, interests, and personality to go in any other direction.
Lazy
Our convenience culture has made people lazy. It is too much work to read a book. It is too much work to actually do any research or studying. Developing interests or skills takes focus and choosing to do something with yourself on a regular basis. I just think people want everything, and I mean everything to be easy and artificial intelligence is seen as an easy button for everything from simple to the complicated.
Obedience
I think people have spent much of their life being obedient. They grew up doing exactly what their parents told them. They followed the course plotted for them by high school counselors when it came to going to college and entering the workforce. They haven’t explored life outside the template being sold to their generation and evolved by marketing and the status quo, always being obedient without question.
Hope
Things are dark right now. I think AI has become religion for a lot of folks. It is why they think AI will fix the environment when it will make things worse, and believe AI will cure cancer. I think using AI for ideas is just a drip drip of this morphine hope IV, providing a distraction from the pain and anxiety of our daily existence giving you something to place all of your hope rather than actually standing up and doing anything.
Fantasy
A good deal of people live in a fantasy world of their choosing. For many this began in their youth as science fiction, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter, but for others it is more about startups, technology, and the Vegas mentality of our world. Regardless of origins I think people have opted to live almost exclusively in their fantasy world and absolutely love the opportunity to give over their existence to AI delivering on this fantasy.
Programming
We have all been programmed from an early age. I think programming comes in different forms if you are white and male. I think much of the historical Hollywood, Television, and other cultural programming has set the stage for people welcoming artificial intelligence and the people behind it without any critical response. I think most people just see AI naturally as the next wave of programming like any other media programming.
Eugenics
Artificial Intelligence aligns with many people’s overt and covert belief around race. Tagging and organizing things into logical buckets really speaks to how people believe the messy world of humans should work. I think that AI really accomplishes what they believe should be happening, but does it in a way that keeps it out of sight and mind, as white people believe these types of messy things should be handled.
Accountability Sinks
AI is a scalable accountability sink and provides the ability for people to hide all kinds of shady behavior, such as stealing books from authors, or black and brown people augmenting your “intelligence”. AI is an invisible and infinitely scalable version of the unaccountability that corporations have enjoyed for decades. People really enjoy the ability to put AI in between them and their customers, consistituents, or anybody else on the receiving end of their decisions, and keeping themselves from ever being accountable for those decisions.
Saying No to AI
I have stopped using ChatGPT for anything related to profiling APIs. I haven’t yet pushed forward with any usage of Gemini, Claude, Llama, or other popular AI flavors. At this point I am saying no to AI. I still use TensorFlow to produce the images I use in my storytelling but this has been in protest since 2016, so I consider outside this moment. I just cannot see any good reason I should be complicit in the AI discussion, and people working so hard to find a problem for the AI solution has completely turned me off, and when you combine it with all the authoritarian shift in technology right now—I will not be reversing this course.
