Another AI rant

I was reading Mark Zuckerberg’s AI treatise and the thing that I can’t get over with all of the people who are so in love with AI is the general loss of humanity that embracing AI brings:

  • AI makes us more productive - Great, so we offload tasks to a robot that is sometimes right, sometimes not. And what do we do with that “extra” time? More work! So we should embrace AI because it lets us do MORE work?

  • AI leads to new breakthroughs - If that’s the case, where are they? Is cancer cured or world hunger solved? No, of course not. At it’s best, AI is good at organizing existing content, not making new things. It might find patterns but those patterns don’t lead to many positive outcomes, at least not at the sheer cost of throwing AI at every possible possible.

  • AI will lead to more income equality - Yeah, this one is rich. Aside from the biggest AI companies being controlled by a smaller group of people, the whole idea of “disbursement” of AI wealth is a joke. Anyone who REALLY believes that these companies will just hand out money to improve the world, just for the goodness of humanity, is out of their mind. We are hoarding creatures, always looking out for our own, and anything that threatens that goes against the core tenant of who we are in our lizard brains. If handing out money was even possible in the way the AI folks talk about it, we would have done it already.

  • AI can help make us smarter - Sure, it might be good for answering a question about how to do something. But part of learning is making those pathways in your brain to remember how something is done or the “why” in something, that’s what skill building is. If the text is just regurgitated to you, you don’t learn anything and build those skills, you just memorize what you need and move on.

  • AI helps us be more creative with our hobbies - This is the one that is the most soul sucking to me. The whole point of doing a hobby is to DO IT, to get better at it and learn and improvise. If we offload that to something else, we don’t gain anything as a person, we just check off things on a list to say that we did them, thereby sucking the joy of learning out of something that we previously enjoyed doing. Using AI to learn things doesn’t teach us skills, it deskills us by making things “easier”

So yeah, sorry Mark, AI is not better for humanity in any way shape or form.