Sensible folks agree: we should kill AI
By Holland Grootonk on Friday, July 5 2024, 16:05 - Permalink
What can I say? Besides, "AI should die a fast death very soon."
I'm an extremist of sorts about a variety of topics. Hard not to be when someone decided long before I was born that seemingly sensible ideas like "People should have access to food and housing," or "It's wrong to surveil people for ones own pleasure, profit, or power" are extremist views. So apparently I'm an extremist but the good news is so are my homies.
I just came across this blog post by a writer named Ali Alkhatib explaining his thoughts about destroying and sabotaging AI, and the moral imperative to do so. It's such a relief to read. Recently I've been responding to defenses of AI under the pretense that it "can/should be used responsibly" on Mastodon by simply stating what seems to me to be an obvious point: there is NO WAY to "responsibly use" a technology which has already been shown to have a grotesquely outsized climate impact for it's demonstrably positive contributions, which it turns out are vanishingly few (most of the supposed benefits are completely speculative thus far and will only arrive if we allow them to suck up Earth's precious resources and pump heat and carbon into the environment until they can perfect the technology; an arrogant and frivolous position at best, sociopathic and society-collapsing at worst).
Listen, any new technology which doesn't make our currently institutionalized planet-destroying industries obsolete in favor of a significantly improved environmental impact and social cost, while also not making a whole bunch of stuff worse at the same time, is FUCKING WORTHLESS. That's it. We do not need it. We don't need more bullshit to help us rot our sad little brains, we're doing that just fine. We don't need better ways to fuck over domestic workers and exploit and abuse poor folks abroad, we're already excelling at that too. We don't need the stock market Number to Go Up. We don't need to make customer service MORE DIFFICULT TO ACCESS. And we DON'T fucking NEED to have more precise ad-targeting.
The people who need these things are literally THE ACTUAL REAL-LIFE VILLAINS. Sorry for the conspiracy-theory big-letter talk, I'm just so tired of all this stupid trash being constantly spewed across the only planet that I have to live on by a relatively tiny number of extremely fucked up human beings. These people are not fit for society. They do not have your best interests in mind, and they don't care about the fact that YES, the goddamn planet is getting hotter, and even if it wasn't, the drinkable water is getting deleted or polluted, and the soil is getting fucked with chemicals and plastics, the air is getting fucked with chemicals and plastics, and now our actual bodies are fucked with chemicals and plastics. Literally, scientists have found micro plastics EVERYWHERE, in our blood, our feces, our sex organs, even the blood and feces of newborn babies. NEW-BORNS, as in never even lived in this trash hell before. We're just straight up birthing out new human beings who come pre-filled with plastic for our convenience.
Corporations don't just need "regulated"; some of them need to be straight up brutally sacrificed for the ensured health of the planet and everything that lives on it. We simply do not have the time or resources to afford any new and exciting ways to burn fossil fuels and suck up water, and we especially cannot be doing it for the sake of a technology that is almost exclusively being used to spy, steal, sow disinformation, deny health insurance coverage, help cops arrest people on false pretenses, and help militaries murder people with drones. This technology is already actively making life WORSE, on a macro level for sure but even for individuals (have you used a search engine lately?). This technology is specifically being used to PREVENT actual good things from happening almost all the time. The only actual benefit I've ever heard of with AI is that it might be better at detecting tumors in scans than people are. Maybe. It is just not that good at anything we are consuming LARGE AMOUNTS of LIMITED resources and HARMING REAL PEOPLE to make it do mediocre bullshit so rich dumbasses can get richer.
The fact that this is not extremely obvious to so many people is melting my goddamn brain. It truly doesn't matter if this tech COULD be good at something maybe, someday. It's not good at anything yet, it won't be for a long time OR MAYBE NEVER, and we'll all be flooded and burned out of our homes in order to find out. The answer is no.
We just. Can't. Afford it. The end. Kill AI.