The best “AI” – well, LLMs, let’s call them by their real name – right now are behind corporate subscriptions.

That tells me everything I need to know about “the future of AI”; it will be used to extract rent from everyone who can do meaningful knowledge work because they will be afraid that their colleague is going to be faster and better than them if they don’t use the LLM. A classic race to the bottom / rat race. Chaos and game theories tell us – and proved it with historical examples – that this spirals down at an accelerating rate until the system crashes and burns.

I for one am not impressed by the normalization of this extreme rent-seeking.

And if artificial super-intelligence indeed emerges, I’ll panic. Severely so. These agents will serve the worst of humanity at the cost of everyone else. So much awful practices in hiring and work have been normalized in the last 10-15 years, that some dystopia sci-fi authors are likely hugely impressed that even their bleak novels missed the mark by such a big margin.

And if ASI comes to existence? Multiply those terrible practices by 100x. Even movies like Blade Runner and games like Cyberpunk 2077 and series like Ghost In The Shell will seem tame and optimistic. I would argue we already live in cyberpunk… but we don’t have the choice to get cool and powerful body implants. We only got the worst parts of it.

I believe the AI area has true potential, but only if it’s forcefully plucked out of the hands of the psychopathic mega-capitalist owner class first. Only if LLMs become libre do we as a civilization have a chance to collectively enact a true positive change in the world.

Before that happens – if it ever happens – we are just very predictably moving to an extremely bleak future. The people who own stuff have proven, time and again, that they are not interested in the well-being of the rest of us.

I’m genuinely worried about the hype. I was in a conversation yesterday with a few people, some who work for small/medium sized companies and some who work for huge companies and they say the same thing… management comes and says “we want to implement GenAI/LLM/buzzword”. No one knows what that means or what it looks like but no one pushes back. Instead they know they’ll be able to pad their resume with “worked on GenAI” and so they work on dubious business value work and produce worse products/features we all have to end up living with and so continues the cycle of software products getting worse and normalized. And eventually the bubble will pop and people will lose their jobs but of course, not anyone from management.

I understand the seductiveness of this line of thinking, but it does well up a despair inside of me.

Mundane tasks are what puts food on our family’s tables, and are by definition a constantly moving target that AI will just shift, not eliminate. Spending our time on junior level tasks is how we become senior. Giving juniors tasks is how we nurture those who will come after our valuable time is up. Talking through problems with our peers is how we build community.

Conversely, chasing constant novelty is unsustainable; “talking” with bots is dehumanizing; and, if social media is any indicator, both are immensely damaging to the human psyche, even if solving interesting problems does itch my ADHD something powerful. Value-maxxing our attention and energy for the benefit of corporate shareholders is not, in my opinion, a way to value our valuable time.

I wanna be part of the human experience, dammit. That’s what makes my time valuable, not my productivity. I don’t want to sell that out to become more efficient, though I will have to if these winds continue to prevail, and I resent it immensely.