Watching the shit going down in the United States, and seeing the general state of the world today, I have to ask… how far, really, is too far for humanity to put up with? Because part of me thinks that "too far" is, at this point, a distant speck behind us, and yet not an awful lot appears to be Getting Done.
Granted, there have been some big protests in LA recently, and justifiably so. This very much counts as Getting Something Done, particularly as it's making the authoritarian nature of the current U.S. government readily apparent through its response to said protests. But a lot of the people in the States with the actual power to Get Something Done — like, say, the Governor of California, or any number of other politicians with a platform — appear to be doing little more than writing sternly worded letters and posting them on social media, when they should be… well, doing more than that.
It's a similar situation, albeit from a wildly different perspective, with the generative AI thing. The general public doesn't want this. The people whose jobs are being put at risk don't want this. The people who just want "going on the computer" to carry the joy it once had around the turn of the century don't want this. And yet every day I read about huge companies like Google stubbornly digging their heels in, even going so far as to lay people off in an attempt to fund something which, at this point, has proven itself beyond a doubt to be inherently unsustainable, unprofitable and, moreover, useless.
And no, I don't want to hear any AI apologists giving me the "oh but it's great for coding and medicine!" spiel. In both of those instances, the prospect of zero human involvement is, frankly, horrifying. With the amount of bullshit generative AI still makes up on the regular, I wouldn't trust it to code anything without intense human supervision, and the second I see a doctor consulting ChatGPT is the second I report that fucker for malpractice.
But outside of outspoken critics like the previously linked Ed Zitron, not a lot seems to be getting done about the AI problem, either. I suspect a lot of people are scared to be the one to speak up at their workplace if their boss suddenly decides that they're going "all-in" on AI, whatever the fuck that means. (Don't worry, this hasn't happened at my place of work, thankfully.) And I think they're probably right to be nervous; I can see people getting shitcanned for spurious reasons like "not being a team player" if they object to their organisation's use of AI — and no, the irony of that would not be lost on me, given AI's potential to break up efficient, quality teams — and we are probably yet to see the true legal ramifications of someone who decides to challenge an employer who let them go in order to replace them with a hallucinating plagiarism machine.
So is that it? Is the answer that very few people are actually doing anything to resist the absolute bullshit that is happening in our because they are scared? If that's the case… yeah. I kind of get it. The stuff coming out of the States is terrifying to see unfold, even as someone an ocean away from where it's actually happening. And I won't lie, the prospect of losing my job to AI is a concern — one that sits at the back of my mind as a near-constant anxiety right now.
I miss being able to enjoy existence. Because it feels like a very long time since I've been proud to be a human being on this Earth at this particular time in history. Instead, it's an embarrassment. A terrifying embarrassment. And I sincerely hope that the day we look back on this and go "Never a-fucking-gain" is sooner rather than later. Because I'm certainly not going to look back on these days and laugh.
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