The Obligatory AI Post
5 hours ago
- The author has minimal firsthand experience with AI and eschews its use, but feels compelled to write a blog post to defend against false accusations of writing 'AI slop' based on stylistic choices like em dashes.
- AI is criticized for promoting ignorance and laziness by replacing the need to learn or struggle, with the goal of making humans 'super-dumb' rather than AI becoming super-intelligent.
- AI's resource consumption exacerbates climate change, causes hardware shortages, and raises electricity costs, while vendors engage in intellectual property theft and regulatory capture.
- The author views AI as an investment bubble or 'black hole' that incentivizes job automation, worker burnout, and productivity theater—such as generating countless apps that nobody buys.
- Speed in software development is seen as a vice; AI-generated code may be fast but software engineering is an art, and mature software should be changed cautiously.
- Using the example of Google fixing bugs with AI, the author argues that corporations could have hired humans but prioritized feature release over bug fixes, making AI a cheap substitute.
- Drawing on '2001: A Space Odyssey,' the author warns that AI like HAL 9000 is an 'idiot savant' that makes catastrophic errors due to human overtrust, and AI should not be dismissed as 'just a tool' since it fundamentally changes society.