What I notice most in the AI conversation is that the so called leaders in this revolution cannot clearly articulate the destination we are going to end up at. There is no clear vision from them while others are noting possible apocalyptic ones. It’s like those who are starting to drive the bus just want to start driving and hope we end up somewhere better. The scary part for me is that they really might not care because they have a perspective that their wealth, interest and power will keep them from suffering the same harms as the rest of us.
My greatest concern about AI at the moment is the environmental devastation. Living as I do in New Mexico - a state that is already in a drought emergency - a state that is a desert in even the best of years - I worry deeply about the fact that so many Data Centers are planned for areas that are already suffering from lack of water . Data Centers need HUGE amounts of water. Where will it come from? "Water is life," we say here -- "Agua es la vida". So, now what? Will people have access to clean, potable water? What about farmers? Locally, people are fighting back mightily. But it is difficult to fight billion dollar corporations and their armies of lawyers who wake every morning with dollar signs dancing in their heads. This needs to be a national conversation. States that are poor and rural are easy targets for private equity firms who come in with promises of jobs and histories of destroying the industries they run. How will populations survive when wells go dry? When municipal water systems fail? Where will people go? What happens to agriculture when the Data Centers speed the arrival of a new Dust Bowl? So, as much as I'm concerned about the impact of AI on verifiable information and on my lifelong livelihood as a writer, I am much more focused on Data Centers and whether or not whole populations --and the land we love - will be at risk.
My locality is Virginia, but same concerns here. They steal all our farmland and our water, and we have to pay for the construction of these monstrosities? Bullshit.
I’m living with secondary progressive Multiple Sclerosis, and AI has changed how I think about access.
MS damaged my dominant hand. I used to be a professional illustrator. Then illness changed my body, and for a long time I thought that part of me was mostly gone.
That is where AI became interesting to me.
Not as a magic trick.
Not as a replacement for human creativity.
As a workaround.
AI-assisted tools helped me make a graphic memoir about living with MS. The tool did not have the experience. The tool did not live the story. The tool did not know what it felt like to lose your hand, your leg, your job, your old identity, and then try to build something honest out of the wreckage.
That part was mine.
The memory was mine.
The choices were mine.
The edits were mine.
The final judgment was mine.
But AI helped lower a wall my body had put in front of me.
That is the part of the AI conversation I wish more people talked about.
Yes, there are real concerns about replacement, fraud, job loss, and cheap slop. I get that. I do not think those concerns are fake.
But for disabled people, AI can also be accessibility infrastructure.
It can help someone write when their hands do not work.
It can help someone organize thoughts when brain fog is brutal.
It can help someone speak, draw, communicate, or participate when the old routes are gone.
For me, AI did not replace my voice.
It helped me get my voice back into the world.
I made the graphic memoir available here, if anyone wants to see what that kind of AI-assisted accessibility workflow can produce:
hello miguel - thank you for your comments about how AI is a tool/resource for equity and inclusion. I'm a retired professor at a Canadian university and working with a doctoral student who has used AI as an editor. She experienced a breakdown which impacted her cognitive capabilities. She has recovered by AI became an important partner in her dissertation journey. WE are now navigating the higher education culture where there are significant differences in the role of AI. And I've not found much on the AI's contribution to creating a path for sharing your voice. I will have a look at your graphic story. well done you. shauna
That phrase — “creating a path for sharing your voice” — is exactly it.
That is the part of the AI conversation I keep coming back to. The concerns are real, especially around education and authorship, but for some disabled people these tools can also become a bridge back into participation.
For me, it was not about replacing the work. It was about finding a way to keep making the work after MS changed what my body could do.
Thank you, Deborah. I really appreciate that. ‘Very human journey’ is exactly what I hoped would come through. MS changed how I could make the work, but the story itself came straight from lived experience.
thank you for putting this forward. Technology has been a boon to many folks with disabilities and that aspect should definitely be brought into the conversation. I think it's great that you have found a way to express what is important to you. I am curious as to what you see as an added bonus of using AI compared to the technology that has already been available?
Just . . . please try to nudge it toward writing more like a human being, could you? It's disheartening to hear its voice in place of yours. It could make some wonder whether AI invented you to advertise itself.
Thank you, Annie. I hear that concern, and honestly, I share it in a lot of cases.
But with my book, that is not what happened.
This was not a prompt-and-out-came-a-book situation. I wrote the story. I built the page flow. I made the panel decisions. I placed the word balloons. I edited the script. I fought hard to keep the line style and visual language close to mine, not some generic AI look.
AI helped me turn rough sketches, layouts, visual direction, and dictated material into finished panels because MS has damaged my hands and made the old way of working much harder.
So yes, I agree that AI can flatten human voice when people let it take over.
But for me, the point was the opposite.
It helped me keep my voice in the work when my body made the old route harder.
No worries at all, Annie. I understand the concern completely.
This whole area is messy, and I think the distinction matters: AI can absolutely flatten people’s voices when it takes over, but it can also help disabled people keep participating when the old tools stop working.
As a retired academic, I worry about kids in middle and high school producing homework that's done by AI. The problem is that they are pleased with the product, thinking it's smart, creative and factually accurate, with so little work on their part. But they are not learning to think creatively on their own. These are the people who will grow up to be our doctors, the problem solvers in whatever line of work they enter. What will the world be like inhabited by people who can't make smart choices, who can't analyze a problem or situation, who are always looking for the easy way out?
A quick off the cuff response: as a recent NYTimes article on an AI High School noted, a lot of what is being labelled as "AI" has been around for a while and... this is the key takeaway: the parents loved the TEACHERS at the school more than they loved the TECHNOLOGY at the school. As long as humans have agency over the technology, there is nothing to fear...
That said, there IS something to fear about AI... for example, it is not hard to imagine a search engine being captured and marketed widely by MAGA and presenting the "World-according-to-Project-2025" as truth and omitting everything else, sort of a combination of Truth Social and Google... and who might underwrite such a search engine? I'll let readers' imaginations take it from here....
I'm an AI refusenik. I'm old (got Trump beat by a few months), and have a very modest Greatest Generation nest egg (from parents who lived to 97 and 100, bless them), so I can afford to be a refusenik for my last few years on this hell planet (once such a beautiful world).
I'm not afraid of AI, I'm repulsed by it. I'm a writer and editor so I can smell it a mile away. I do not want to talk to a machine. I do not want to read or hear from a machine. I do not want the struggle of thinking and writing lifted off me—that's what makes the breakthroughs, if any, so thrilling (at the price of the frustration and despair—we need to toughen up against those things, like our immune systems need to train on dirt).
There is one thing I have used it for a few times, and that is to try to make a political meme. That's all it's good for, as far as I'm concerned, and it's not even very good at that. I lose patience quickly—can't be bothered to tickle it with endlessly refined prompts.
What's missing from a lot of the conversation about AI is the cost--not in dollars, although I do think AI companies are like drug dealers offering AI up for little to nothing to get us all hooked, and then they can charge any price they like. But the really scary cost is in resources--electricity and water. The U.N. recently produced a report indicating that the world is already facing a severe water crisis. A typical data center requires around 500,000 gallons of water a day to operate. And many data centers are going up in the most water-scarce regions of the country: West Texas, Arizona, Nevada. This is clearly unsustainable and insane. What good will AI be when we have no water to drink or to irrigate crops? How far are we going to go down this path? The tech companies are building data centers as fast as they can because they know people are starting to catch on to just how destructive these facilities are and are starting to object to them being built in their communities. Which means they are going to be built in marginalized communities that do not have the power to stop them.
Anand, a side track/stub off the main AI discussion ... I'm hopeful that AI will force a reappraisal of what it means to be human, in a profoundly positive sense. I'm retired after 50 years designing silicon chips for computers in Silicon Valley after being raised as a small town preacher's kid on the high plains of Colorado. I am convinced that it will soon be scientifically demonstrated we are not simply biological machines, and that both science and organized religion will be coping with the recognized difference for years to come. What will be our response when an AI claims itself conscious? We'd better be ready.
The more I sit with this, the more I think the argument cannot simply be “AI is good” or “AI is bad.”
That frame is too small.
AI can be harmful. It can flatten human work, replace people, steal from artists, burn resources, and make powerful people even more powerful.
But AI can also be useful. For someone like me, living with secondary progressive MS, it can become an accessibility tool. It helped me keep creating after my hands stopped working the way they used to.
So the real question, to me, is not whether AI itself is good or bad.
The real question is: who gets to control it, and who pays the price?
If we leave this entirely in the hands of billionaires, corporations, and profit incentives, then we already know where it goes. Workers become disposable. Artists become raw material. Disabled people become an afterthought. The environment becomes a cost of doing business. The human being gets measured only by whether they are useful to growth.
We have seen this movie before. The tools change. The pattern does not.
That is why regulation matters. Not vague “please be ethical” language. Actual laws with teeth. Labour protection. Copyright protection. Environmental rules. Disability access. Transparency. Accountability.
AI helped me because I am disabled.
That does not mean I trust corporations to decide what AI should become.
I do not believe that we can have a serious conversation about AI without discussing capitalism. Our current billionaire oligarchy is led by digital monopolies centered around Stanford University's Silicon Valley. AI will only increase their power and corruption unless China stops them. However, capitalism always empowers the 1%, more accurately the 0.01%. James Madison and Hamilton ensured that the Constitution would protect the rich over the working class and slaves [see Jeffrey Winters' book The Blind Spot]. From Southern slave owners to JD Rockefeller to 1890s Robber Barons to Oli Oligarchs to our current Tech Bros, money talks.
As a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialist of America, I believe that we must break this chain of oppression.
I've just waded through the entire New Yorker piece by Ronan Farrow, and I'm not sure that I understand much more than when I began it because the whole thing seems so abstract to me. But what I wonder about most concerns the actual fate of affected people. What is the plan for all of the displaced people? I can't help but look at the proliferation of detention centers and the huge funding for ICE as being not about immigration, except as a political red herring, but as a possible solution for where to put the disenfranchised.
I am waiting for the companies who are building AI plants to include recycling the water as part of their increase of use on a limited resource that is under profound strain already. Then there is the strain on our electric grids. And all this so we can play or put people out of work as do it ourselvers?
I feel we’ve lost our way. What is the point of art unless it is one human speaking to another? Ditto journalism. What is the point of living if it isn’t about each individual learning, striving, interacting, loving? Do I need to say with one another?
It has been so obvious that we should not have billionaires, they should have to pay their workers until they are not billionaires.
Instead we are giving a few men machines that we may not be able to turn off when they decide to kill us all or rule us all. Am I going too far?
I think not. We desperately need regulation. But our president is too busy starting wars to avoid us reckoning with his Epstein connections. They must be pretty terrible. Or he’s finding ways to make money off of us, off the billionaires, other countries. I honestly think T would be happy if the world ended as long as he’d caused it.
Then there is the possibility that AI will get to a place militarily where the machines decide to end the world and we can’t turn them off. Is that too far fetched? And we are hastening the end with unregulated AI.
Perhaps I am too apocalyptic but I am not engaging with AI directly by choice until it is regulated.
I agree with your stated concerns. It reminds me of the slippery slope we’ve been sliding down with Trump 2.0. We second guess the rise of authoritarianism before our eyes because it feels too “apocalyptic” . But that doesn’t mean it isn’t so.
I think that AI is probably a technology we cannot either stop or avoid; it’s been seized upon as a leveler of skill sets (if you can’t figure out how to do something, get someone else/AI to do it for you!) and has become a standard part of the tool kit for too many people for it to be set aside at this point. There are many things about AI, however, that I think are not part of the conversation because they aren’t affecting most of those who use it, and I think that must change. I live in rural central Virginia. Northern Virginia is, alas, the home of an enormous number of giant data centers. They are both power and water guzzlers, and this is the source of increasing local backlash against the data centers hosting the AI generating computers. Right now, a consortium of power generating companies is working on a proposal to run the largest electrical towers in use in Virginia (765KV, with towers ~160ft high every quarter of a mile) across a swath of working farmland and forests. Virginia also happens to be in the grip of a two-year drought, with people’s wells in my area struggling to keep providing water. Opposition to the project is fierce and growing. Will we be able to stop it? I don’t know, but I suspect the odds are not in our favor. (I’m hopeful we can force the consortium to choose a route that destroys less working land and keeps the electrical discharge static away from homes and schools.). If those people using this technology as a crutch today had to pay for the damage being done where their tool is produced, would they be so eager to make use of it?
As an environmental journalist in the desert Southwest, I have a big problem with the environmental justice aspects of AI development. I am less concerned about water use than I used to be, given that AI’s water use is still a fraction of a percent of the amount of water it takes to maintain our current consumption of feedlot livestock for meat and dairy. That said, wastewater from these things is going to introduce biocides and other industrial chemicals into rivers, streams, or aquifers. The energy consumption for training AIs is a serious concern, likely to undo any gains we’ve made in reducing our carbon consumption. Natural gas or diesel backup generators are a huge threat to Frontline communities. And then there’s the increasing evidence that using AI for replacing cognitive tasks, erodes your ability to do those cognitive tasks on your own.
All that said, and it’s a lot, I am almost as disturbed by the rise of AI shaming, in which people take their legitimate concerns about AI and use them to dump on individuals or small nonprofits for using AI to do things like create social media, generate transcripts, and the like. Despite the newness of the technology, we are, at least for the time being, embedded in a network of systems that use AI, whether we like it or not. It would make orders of magnitude more sense to shame individuals or small organizations for using internal combustion engines to get people to events or whatever, given that the environmental impact of a typical query to ChatGPT is equivalent to driving your Prius about 10 feet. But somehow we don’t see gasoline shaming on social media. AI shaming won’t keep people from using AI, but it will keep people from being transparent about it. And that transparency is something we are absolutely going to need if we really want to content with a disinformation potential that inheres in AI.
The central developmental problem is the engineering of human cognition. Because of the benefits of AI (in particular the area of human health) it cannot be dismissed as trivial. Our immediate beef should center on building some manner of a beneficial cognitive resistance to the marketing powers of AI. We have a great living example of the dangers found in transactional thinking. How do we reaffirm virtues and values that are beneficial and resilient for the life of the individual?
What I notice most in the AI conversation is that the so called leaders in this revolution cannot clearly articulate the destination we are going to end up at. There is no clear vision from them while others are noting possible apocalyptic ones. It’s like those who are starting to drive the bus just want to start driving and hope we end up somewhere better. The scary part for me is that they really might not care because they have a perspective that their wealth, interest and power will keep them from suffering the same harms as the rest of us.
Well said, Kevin. I think a lot of people feel this viscerally.
My greatest concern about AI at the moment is the environmental devastation. Living as I do in New Mexico - a state that is already in a drought emergency - a state that is a desert in even the best of years - I worry deeply about the fact that so many Data Centers are planned for areas that are already suffering from lack of water . Data Centers need HUGE amounts of water. Where will it come from? "Water is life," we say here -- "Agua es la vida". So, now what? Will people have access to clean, potable water? What about farmers? Locally, people are fighting back mightily. But it is difficult to fight billion dollar corporations and their armies of lawyers who wake every morning with dollar signs dancing in their heads. This needs to be a national conversation. States that are poor and rural are easy targets for private equity firms who come in with promises of jobs and histories of destroying the industries they run. How will populations survive when wells go dry? When municipal water systems fail? Where will people go? What happens to agriculture when the Data Centers speed the arrival of a new Dust Bowl? So, as much as I'm concerned about the impact of AI on verifiable information and on my lifelong livelihood as a writer, I am much more focused on Data Centers and whether or not whole populations --and the land we love - will be at risk.
Yes, Heidi. More Perfect Union has done powerful work on this angle. Very important one
My locality is Virginia, but same concerns here. They steal all our farmland and our water, and we have to pay for the construction of these monstrosities? Bullshit.
I’m living with secondary progressive Multiple Sclerosis, and AI has changed how I think about access.
MS damaged my dominant hand. I used to be a professional illustrator. Then illness changed my body, and for a long time I thought that part of me was mostly gone.
That is where AI became interesting to me.
Not as a magic trick.
Not as a replacement for human creativity.
As a workaround.
AI-assisted tools helped me make a graphic memoir about living with MS. The tool did not have the experience. The tool did not live the story. The tool did not know what it felt like to lose your hand, your leg, your job, your old identity, and then try to build something honest out of the wreckage.
That part was mine.
The memory was mine.
The choices were mine.
The edits were mine.
The final judgment was mine.
But AI helped lower a wall my body had put in front of me.
That is the part of the AI conversation I wish more people talked about.
Yes, there are real concerns about replacement, fraud, job loss, and cheap slop. I get that. I do not think those concerns are fake.
But for disabled people, AI can also be accessibility infrastructure.
It can help someone write when their hands do not work.
It can help someone organize thoughts when brain fog is brutal.
It can help someone speak, draw, communicate, or participate when the old routes are gone.
For me, AI did not replace my voice.
It helped me get my voice back into the world.
I made the graphic memoir available here, if anyone wants to see what that kind of AI-assisted accessibility workflow can produce:
https://morethanms.miguelallamani.com/
hello miguel - thank you for your comments about how AI is a tool/resource for equity and inclusion. I'm a retired professor at a Canadian university and working with a doctoral student who has used AI as an editor. She experienced a breakdown which impacted her cognitive capabilities. She has recovered by AI became an important partner in her dissertation journey. WE are now navigating the higher education culture where there are significant differences in the role of AI. And I've not found much on the AI's contribution to creating a path for sharing your voice. I will have a look at your graphic story. well done you. shauna
Thank you, Shauna. I really appreciate this.
That phrase — “creating a path for sharing your voice” — is exactly it.
That is the part of the AI conversation I keep coming back to. The concerns are real, especially around education and authorship, but for some disabled people these tools can also become a bridge back into participation.
For me, it was not about replacing the work. It was about finding a way to keep making the work after MS changed what my body could do.
I hope the graphic story lands with you.
Miguel
Your graphic memoir is wonderful! Thank you for sharing it! Best wishes on this very human journey!
Thank you, Deborah. I really appreciate that. ‘Very human journey’ is exactly what I hoped would come through. MS changed how I could make the work, but the story itself came straight from lived experience.
thank you for putting this forward. Technology has been a boon to many folks with disabilities and that aspect should definitely be brought into the conversation. I think it's great that you have found a way to express what is important to you. I am curious as to what you see as an added bonus of using AI compared to the technology that has already been available?
That's a worthy use of AI, more power to you!
Just . . . please try to nudge it toward writing more like a human being, could you? It's disheartening to hear its voice in place of yours. It could make some wonder whether AI invented you to advertise itself.
Thank you, Annie. I hear that concern, and honestly, I share it in a lot of cases.
But with my book, that is not what happened.
This was not a prompt-and-out-came-a-book situation. I wrote the story. I built the page flow. I made the panel decisions. I placed the word balloons. I edited the script. I fought hard to keep the line style and visual language close to mine, not some generic AI look.
AI helped me turn rough sketches, layouts, visual direction, and dictated material into finished panels because MS has damaged my hands and made the old way of working much harder.
So yes, I agree that AI can flatten human voice when people let it take over.
But for me, the point was the opposite.
It helped me keep my voice in the work when my body made the old route harder.
Miguel
I believe you and I apologize if I seemed to imply otherwise.
No worries at all, Annie. I understand the concern completely.
This whole area is messy, and I think the distinction matters: AI can absolutely flatten people’s voices when it takes over, but it can also help disabled people keep participating when the old tools stop working.
That is the line I’m trying to stay honest about.
Miguel
As a retired academic, I worry about kids in middle and high school producing homework that's done by AI. The problem is that they are pleased with the product, thinking it's smart, creative and factually accurate, with so little work on their part. But they are not learning to think creatively on their own. These are the people who will grow up to be our doctors, the problem solvers in whatever line of work they enter. What will the world be like inhabited by people who can't make smart choices, who can't analyze a problem or situation, who are always looking for the easy way out?
I worry about this aspect with my own kids
A quick off the cuff response: as a recent NYTimes article on an AI High School noted, a lot of what is being labelled as "AI" has been around for a while and... this is the key takeaway: the parents loved the TEACHERS at the school more than they loved the TECHNOLOGY at the school. As long as humans have agency over the technology, there is nothing to fear...
That said, there IS something to fear about AI... for example, it is not hard to imagine a search engine being captured and marketed widely by MAGA and presenting the "World-according-to-Project-2025" as truth and omitting everything else, sort of a combination of Truth Social and Google... and who might underwrite such a search engine? I'll let readers' imaginations take it from here....
I'm an AI refusenik. I'm old (got Trump beat by a few months), and have a very modest Greatest Generation nest egg (from parents who lived to 97 and 100, bless them), so I can afford to be a refusenik for my last few years on this hell planet (once such a beautiful world).
I'm not afraid of AI, I'm repulsed by it. I'm a writer and editor so I can smell it a mile away. I do not want to talk to a machine. I do not want to read or hear from a machine. I do not want the struggle of thinking and writing lifted off me—that's what makes the breakthroughs, if any, so thrilling (at the price of the frustration and despair—we need to toughen up against those things, like our immune systems need to train on dirt).
There is one thing I have used it for a few times, and that is to try to make a political meme. That's all it's good for, as far as I'm concerned, and it's not even very good at that. I lose patience quickly—can't be bothered to tickle it with endlessly refined prompts.
P.S. I don't want an Oura ring or a health and fitness app, either.
What's missing from a lot of the conversation about AI is the cost--not in dollars, although I do think AI companies are like drug dealers offering AI up for little to nothing to get us all hooked, and then they can charge any price they like. But the really scary cost is in resources--electricity and water. The U.N. recently produced a report indicating that the world is already facing a severe water crisis. A typical data center requires around 500,000 gallons of water a day to operate. And many data centers are going up in the most water-scarce regions of the country: West Texas, Arizona, Nevada. This is clearly unsustainable and insane. What good will AI be when we have no water to drink or to irrigate crops? How far are we going to go down this path? The tech companies are building data centers as fast as they can because they know people are starting to catch on to just how destructive these facilities are and are starting to object to them being built in their communities. Which means they are going to be built in marginalized communities that do not have the power to stop them.
Anand, a side track/stub off the main AI discussion ... I'm hopeful that AI will force a reappraisal of what it means to be human, in a profoundly positive sense. I'm retired after 50 years designing silicon chips for computers in Silicon Valley after being raised as a small town preacher's kid on the high plains of Colorado. I am convinced that it will soon be scientifically demonstrated we are not simply biological machines, and that both science and organized religion will be coping with the recognized difference for years to come. What will be our response when an AI claims itself conscious? We'd better be ready.
The more I sit with this, the more I think the argument cannot simply be “AI is good” or “AI is bad.”
That frame is too small.
AI can be harmful. It can flatten human work, replace people, steal from artists, burn resources, and make powerful people even more powerful.
But AI can also be useful. For someone like me, living with secondary progressive MS, it can become an accessibility tool. It helped me keep creating after my hands stopped working the way they used to.
So the real question, to me, is not whether AI itself is good or bad.
The real question is: who gets to control it, and who pays the price?
If we leave this entirely in the hands of billionaires, corporations, and profit incentives, then we already know where it goes. Workers become disposable. Artists become raw material. Disabled people become an afterthought. The environment becomes a cost of doing business. The human being gets measured only by whether they are useful to growth.
We have seen this movie before. The tools change. The pattern does not.
That is why regulation matters. Not vague “please be ethical” language. Actual laws with teeth. Labour protection. Copyright protection. Environmental rules. Disability access. Transparency. Accountability.
AI helped me because I am disabled.
That does not mean I trust corporations to decide what AI should become.
Keep the access.
Regulate the extraction.
Protect the human.
It's Elyssium for them. District 9 for us. If you don't know what I'm talking about now is a good time to catch up on some dystopic science fiction...
I do not believe that we can have a serious conversation about AI without discussing capitalism. Our current billionaire oligarchy is led by digital monopolies centered around Stanford University's Silicon Valley. AI will only increase their power and corruption unless China stops them. However, capitalism always empowers the 1%, more accurately the 0.01%. James Madison and Hamilton ensured that the Constitution would protect the rich over the working class and slaves [see Jeffrey Winters' book The Blind Spot]. From Southern slave owners to JD Rockefeller to 1890s Robber Barons to Oli Oligarchs to our current Tech Bros, money talks.
As a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialist of America, I believe that we must break this chain of oppression.
I've just waded through the entire New Yorker piece by Ronan Farrow, and I'm not sure that I understand much more than when I began it because the whole thing seems so abstract to me. But what I wonder about most concerns the actual fate of affected people. What is the plan for all of the displaced people? I can't help but look at the proliferation of detention centers and the huge funding for ICE as being not about immigration, except as a political red herring, but as a possible solution for where to put the disenfranchised.
I am waiting for the companies who are building AI plants to include recycling the water as part of their increase of use on a limited resource that is under profound strain already. Then there is the strain on our electric grids. And all this so we can play or put people out of work as do it ourselvers?
I feel we’ve lost our way. What is the point of art unless it is one human speaking to another? Ditto journalism. What is the point of living if it isn’t about each individual learning, striving, interacting, loving? Do I need to say with one another?
It has been so obvious that we should not have billionaires, they should have to pay their workers until they are not billionaires.
Instead we are giving a few men machines that we may not be able to turn off when they decide to kill us all or rule us all. Am I going too far?
I think not. We desperately need regulation. But our president is too busy starting wars to avoid us reckoning with his Epstein connections. They must be pretty terrible. Or he’s finding ways to make money off of us, off the billionaires, other countries. I honestly think T would be happy if the world ended as long as he’d caused it.
Then there is the possibility that AI will get to a place militarily where the machines decide to end the world and we can’t turn them off. Is that too far fetched? And we are hastening the end with unregulated AI.
Perhaps I am too apocalyptic but I am not engaging with AI directly by choice until it is regulated.
I agree with your stated concerns. It reminds me of the slippery slope we’ve been sliding down with Trump 2.0. We second guess the rise of authoritarianism before our eyes because it feels too “apocalyptic” . But that doesn’t mean it isn’t so.
I think that AI is probably a technology we cannot either stop or avoid; it’s been seized upon as a leveler of skill sets (if you can’t figure out how to do something, get someone else/AI to do it for you!) and has become a standard part of the tool kit for too many people for it to be set aside at this point. There are many things about AI, however, that I think are not part of the conversation because they aren’t affecting most of those who use it, and I think that must change. I live in rural central Virginia. Northern Virginia is, alas, the home of an enormous number of giant data centers. They are both power and water guzzlers, and this is the source of increasing local backlash against the data centers hosting the AI generating computers. Right now, a consortium of power generating companies is working on a proposal to run the largest electrical towers in use in Virginia (765KV, with towers ~160ft high every quarter of a mile) across a swath of working farmland and forests. Virginia also happens to be in the grip of a two-year drought, with people’s wells in my area struggling to keep providing water. Opposition to the project is fierce and growing. Will we be able to stop it? I don’t know, but I suspect the odds are not in our favor. (I’m hopeful we can force the consortium to choose a route that destroys less working land and keeps the electrical discharge static away from homes and schools.). If those people using this technology as a crutch today had to pay for the damage being done where their tool is produced, would they be so eager to make use of it?
As an environmental journalist in the desert Southwest, I have a big problem with the environmental justice aspects of AI development. I am less concerned about water use than I used to be, given that AI’s water use is still a fraction of a percent of the amount of water it takes to maintain our current consumption of feedlot livestock for meat and dairy. That said, wastewater from these things is going to introduce biocides and other industrial chemicals into rivers, streams, or aquifers. The energy consumption for training AIs is a serious concern, likely to undo any gains we’ve made in reducing our carbon consumption. Natural gas or diesel backup generators are a huge threat to Frontline communities. And then there’s the increasing evidence that using AI for replacing cognitive tasks, erodes your ability to do those cognitive tasks on your own.
All that said, and it’s a lot, I am almost as disturbed by the rise of AI shaming, in which people take their legitimate concerns about AI and use them to dump on individuals or small nonprofits for using AI to do things like create social media, generate transcripts, and the like. Despite the newness of the technology, we are, at least for the time being, embedded in a network of systems that use AI, whether we like it or not. It would make orders of magnitude more sense to shame individuals or small organizations for using internal combustion engines to get people to events or whatever, given that the environmental impact of a typical query to ChatGPT is equivalent to driving your Prius about 10 feet. But somehow we don’t see gasoline shaming on social media. AI shaming won’t keep people from using AI, but it will keep people from being transparent about it. And that transparency is something we are absolutely going to need if we really want to content with a disinformation potential that inheres in AI.
The central developmental problem is the engineering of human cognition. Because of the benefits of AI (in particular the area of human health) it cannot be dismissed as trivial. Our immediate beef should center on building some manner of a beneficial cognitive resistance to the marketing powers of AI. We have a great living example of the dangers found in transactional thinking. How do we reaffirm virtues and values that are beneficial and resilient for the life of the individual?
ben