I'm Sick of AI Everything

A while back, I stopped using Facebook because I just couldn't take it anymore. Just totally sick of it. I'm honestly getting there with AI. At this point, I would prefer to have anything AI related just be blocked at the browser level.

There’s something uninspiring about a machine thats supposed to “do the hard things for you” so to speak. I like using my mind and understanding things deeply.

Sure you could say that “managing the AI” can be deeply understood in a way but it’s just not exciting.

I'm looking at engineering job specs at the moment and it's very wearisome that every company seems to have pivoted from highlighting the unique value they provide to customers to putting AI front and centre in their employer branding. My eyes immediately glaze over at what may have been the result of "Claude, take this HR/marketing/whatever copy and inject some AI".

I've adopted the tools because they're useful, but businesses need to chill. AI seems to amplify existing bottlenecks within organisations, so we should probably tread carefully when it comes to pushing the tech. Fix the organisational problems first and hedge our bets.

I wonder if anyone reading this was around during the dot-com bubble because maybe it felt the same...

Yes, I was around then. It felt exactly the same. That’s how you know it’s a bubble. Because everyone starts acting stupid and conjuring up all these ridiculous explanations for why it makes sense when it plainly doesn’t. In 1999, everything was about the Internet, even when it didn’t make sense. Every company was saying that to be left out of the “Internet revolution” was a fast path to bankruptcy. It’s the same with AI today. Yes, the Internet was important and some companies did get displaced, but most didn’t. So too for AI.

I was around during the dot-com bubble. When it popped it popped pretty quickly. It wasn't a slow leak. Everything needed to be a dot-com and everything was centered around being a dot-com no matter what the business actually did. Money was pouring and almost anything dot-com was getting funding.

I moved to a dot-com right at the tail end of it. We built a pretty decent startup from scratch within the first two months and debuted at one of the largest trade shows in the world. We had our own private label factoring credit card and we did credit card transactions over the internet and with handheld cellular devices. It was built to scale, colocated, and we were getting customers. When the floor dropped out it was done in less than two months. dot-com was a very negative thing for a while after that.

One problem is that when people delegate tasks to AI, they don't themselves learn anything from doing the task -- not just in the general sense of personal improvement, but in the very concrete sense of "what is it that was produced".

Before AI, when someone showed you a presentation or an Excel sheet, even if it was complete horseshit that they had made up, they knew what was in it: they knew more about it than you, by definition.

Now, not so much; people output things they know nothing about, and when they show it to you they are discovering it just as you are.

I have a tech support buddy who, while good, allows himself more arrogance than his skills deserve. I asked him what CRC errors, and he said to ask AI, kindly providing me its output:

CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) errors on Wi-Fi indicate that data frames were corrupted during transmission, often caused by high electromagnetic interference (EMI), physical layer issues, or faulty hardware. They cause packet loss, slow speeds, and intermittent connectivity. Common solutions include replacing cables, reducing interference, updating drivers, and adjusting radio power

This is all well and good except: read the prompt carefully. It never actually says what CRC errors are. This is the average AI user: literally work on, build, and fix things without the slightest clue about what it is you're actually working on.

After watching the GPT images release video, it reenforced my skepticism that society will adapt. Then I thought about AI analysis of people's movements in public and realized that governments already capture everything, and now will be able to use infinite AI surveillance agents to watch all things all the time. Any disobedience or crime can be instantly investigated by asking AI to analyze the behavior of all people and vehicles. AI is the destruction of individual freedom. It is the destruction of citizens' ability to rebel against power.

I block YouTube channels if I see they use AI slop as their thumbnail image and certainly if they use AI voices once the video starts playing. AI slop everywhere.