The crazyness in the name of AI
Table of Contents
The ability of humans to develop and use tools is cited as the reason for our dominance over the planet. We have always strived and found ways to get the desired output with less time, money or energy.
Today, we are looking at a tool that is promising to eradicate the need of all human effort. Keeping the hyped promises aside, there are three possilbile alternate universes we may find ourselves in, say 10 years down the line:
- the hype fails to deliver on its promises the world goes back to the way things were before November 2022.
- AI has become super advanced as the proponents were claiming.
- we are somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.
Let analyze the effect on our social, economic, political spheres of human existence keeping all there propositions in mind:
Thinking
What do we do when we think? What happnes when we outsource our thinking to a machine? What happens to the parts of our brain when they are not used?
A decade later, would we need to go to gyms for our minds, too to prevent mental atrophy?
The Bubble
A lot have been written and spoken about the financial bubble. The stalwarts of the industry have accepted that there is a bubble. The uncertainty is only about when it would burst.
People are hoping that after it bursts, there is a lot of cheap hardware for humanity.
Software Engineering
Environment
The energy consumption, the air and noise pollution, cooling with fresh water, destruction of green cover should be concerning.
What are we accelerating the destruction of the planet for? What do we gain?
Learning
The only way we learn something, truely, is by doing it ourselves. We get better at whatever we practice every day. We gradually forget what we do not practice. Becoming good at something requires investing 1000s of hours trying and failing at it.
Every skill erodes, every muscle atrophies when left unused.
Watching someone do something may inspire a student, but they only learn when they try and fail and try again.
The pretense
There is one thing that AI of the present day does, really, really well. It uniquely enables one to masquerade as someone they are not, and hold up the pretense for a decent while.
A layman could pretend to be a doctor: to their family. A doctor could pretend to be a lawyer: to their colleague. A lawyer could pretend to be a programmer: to an VC. A D-grade student can pretend to be a A grade one: to their professor. A bad professional can pretend to be a great one: to their boss. A great programmer can pretend to be super fast as well: to their client. A loss making enterprise can pretend to be the hottest stock: on the market.
Not to mention actual scammers, who can quite convincingly, pretend to be a loved one - to their next mark!
I won't say this did not happen before. It did. What is new, is the sheer number of people begining to believe their own lie, buying their facade, succumbing to their own scam. The crude reality of every pretense is that the bill comes due, eventually. Honest humans can only hold up the facade for so long before the lie is shattered, either by reality or by their own consciousness weighing in.
Economy, at large.
Every disruption caused by technological advancement happened in one sector at a time. The automation shifted workforce from one domain to another. What we are threatening to do now, is erode the value of every knowledge worker at the same time.
So in scenario 2, if everyose's jobs have been automated, who buys whatever the proponents of AI are selling?
And with no demand, what does supply even mean?
Do the equations of demand-supply-price mean anything in that universe?
Conspiracy theroy
The marketing push, the induced frenzy, the hype, the hullabaloo is a charade. Besides the obvious short-term goal of cashing out at the stock market, something more nefarious is bubbling under the surface.
Long term, when the entire working population is dependent on this tool to get by, the subscriptions of ever-so-helpful tools will drop their subsidies and try to make a profit. The slaves of LLMs, having forgotten how to do their own jobs, will have to cough-up whatever is extorted to continue to pretend to be what they once were.
The missing next generation
There will be no juniors, to train.