#oneaday Day 144: Are we fucked?

With each passing day, I feel like it’s getting harder and harder to ignore the feeling that we, the humans, are completely and utterly fucked.

And I mean this in a variety of ways. For one, it’s impossible to ignore the wilful ignorance “big tech” is demonstrating in the current “AI” gold rush. After years of getting things like carbon emissions and sustainable energy production into a good place — likely far too late, but still, the effort was happening — it seems all the big players in the tech space have just gone “haha! Fuck that, we’ve got a new toy, and bollocks to the frankly unnecessary amount of energy it consumes to power it”.

And this is about the third or fourth energy-inefficient tech gold rush at this point, after cryptocurrency and NFTs. The one thing those things and “AI” have in common is that they’re hawked by people who are completely unable to explain how their supposed benefits outweigh the absurd cost in resources required to use them. At worst, they’re used as outright scams.

AI is even worse at this point. In the last few weeks, I’ve seen several adverts for “AI”. Not an AI product, not a revolutionary and groundbreaking use case for AI… just adverts for “we are a tech company and we’re doing… something… with AI because every other fucker is”. It is absolutely telling that not one of these adverts has been able to depict AI doing anything remotely useful, and that none of them even attempt to explain why AI is a good thing. Because, as most people who have been paying attention will know at this point, there is no product.

Seriously. There is no compelling use case for AI that isn’t already covered in a more energy-efficient format by existing tech.

Want to find information? Search engines exist, both for the whole Web and within a single site.

Want to write code? Well, you’d better learn, because ChatGPT is going to spit out bullshit that is full of errors that you won’t know how to spot without knowing how to code.

Need an image? There are billions of images online, many of which are royalty free or suitable for use via fair use provisions. There are free art packages available. And there are lots of artists who will draw whatever the hell you want — yes, even that — if you give them some money.

Can’t write an email? Bullshit you can’t. If you can write a ChatGPT prompt you can write a fucking email. Stop being a lazy cunt.

Need AI to “summarise” something for you? Just read the fucking thing, it’s not hard, and as a species we’ve spent several thousand years mastering that basic skill.

So that’s a concern, both for the environmental impact and for how it will affect the job market. I’m also rather concerned about how medicine seems to be super-keen to use AI rather than, you know, human doctors. I’m sure that’s going to be a fun few lawsuits in the near future.

And outside of all this nonsense, we have the current state of world politics, particularly the US. I have friends in the States who are — quite rightly, I feel — legitimately terrified about what the upcoming election will result in. And while I thought people were overreacting somewhat back in 2016 when this situation last presented itself, having seen how utterly deranged Trump and his most obsequious sycophants are behaving in the run-up to this election… yeah. I get it.

So the inevitable conclusion to all this is to find myself sitting alone in a hotel room asking myself “are we fucked?” Cause I think we might be, y’know. I think we might be.

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