The AI Mirage

Photo taken by Nathan Fox while we were driving MN 11 along the Rainy River

The conversation about AI, specifically generative AI, has grown in recent years from the hottest new thing to an out-of-control blaze sucking up all the oxygen in the room. (Or maybe all the water from the aquifer?) I hope you can forgive me for adding yet another voice to it and fanning the flames. Though the technology is being touted as the future of work, of the economy, of knowledge, of communication, of...virtually everything, its trajectory, the world AI is bringing into being, is far from clear. And while almost everyone has an opinion on it, those opinions range from excitement to wonder to anxiety to outright hostility.

Will AI free us from the shackles of work and usher in a techno-paradise where machines serve man? Will it turbocharge innovation and economic activity by letting one person do the work of ten? Or will it create even more unemployment than the Great Depression and drive billions to poverty or abject dependence? Will it gain sentience, stop obeying us and destroy humanity? Is artificial general intelligence, AI that outperforms humans in all areas and can even improve itself, really coming in the next few years? Public figures have made all of these claims (sometimes several of them at once!). That all of these futures are at times treated as plausible speaks to the fragmented, siloed nature of public discourse about AI as well as the importance of seeking clarity and answers about these and other important questions. I hope that what I write here will contribute to that clarity for those who read it.

Let me show my hand now. In case you couldn't guess, I am not a fan of generative AI. I have never used it (at least by choice) and have no plans to start doing so. The words, thoughts, and any mistakes I share on the subject are my own. My critique of AI can be broken up into six main points/posts, which I'll summarize here.

1. First and foremost, AI doesn't work. It fails persistently, egregiously, and unpredictably at the kinds of tasks it's supposed to be able to outperform and replace humans at, increasingly often as the complexity of those tasks increases. Working with AI means having a coworker or underling (or, God forbid, boss) that confidently lies and makes things up, thinks it knows everything but doesn't know what it doesn't know, can't be relied on or trusted, and whose every action and output must be verified for correctness. Contrary to what AI proponents would have you think, this is not an engineering problem that can be solved with more money and compute power, but an inherent limitation of the current technology.
2. Next, AI doesn't think and is not intelligent—and to suppose that it does, or that it is, is to do great violence to the "actual intelligence" (as Steve Wozniak describes it) that human beings possess. The human tendency to mistake machine use of human language for humanlike intelligence is not new, but it is being supercharged by generative AI's apparent fluency, versatility, and eagerness to please. Believing that AI is as intelligent as humans, or will soon be, and that thought is reducible to the kind of information-processing that computers are suited for, blinds us to the depth and breadth of our humanity and reduces our view of ourselves to slow, defective computers in need of technological completion.
3. Building off the previous two points, relying on AI is dangerous to our humanity. Outsourcing our cognition, creativity, competency, or other higher faculties to AI is a disastrous idea. We are still only beginning to reckon with the formative effects of computers, the internet, smartphones, and other technologies on how we think, learn, work, and interact with each other, and that caused by AI threatens to dwarf them all if the growth stories of AI prophets are taken seriously.
4. If these things are true and so obvious to many people, why does generative AI seem to be taking over everything? Because beneath the exciting hype, AI is not for us. The impetus to deploy AI at such breathtaking pace and society-transforming scale, and to rely on it so heavily in so many areas of life, is not driven by the actual value it delivers to its users or the potential they see in it, but by those who build, run, and stand to profit from AI services. Their vision of an AI-run future is not a place we want to go—it is neither desirable nor inevitable. We need to tell a better story than the tired old materialist, capitalist yarn of endless growth and progress that got us here.
5. Fifth, AI is not economically viable (at least with current technology). It is yet another economic bubble—the biggest one ever—and the fallout when it pops will be severe. Its rapid growth and takeover of society has been made possible by offering AI services for much, much less than they actually cost to provide, and most users balk when asked to pay something closer to the actual price. Even the biggest, most advanced AI companies are far from profitable, and it's doubtful they ever could be. Not only is it far from clear if using AI is actually more cost-effective than human labor (in part because of its unreliability), the increasingly-large gobs of money customers are paying for it go straight to corporate technocrats rather than to the human workers they are supposed to replace.
6. Finally, AI is unsustainable. The physical substrate that AI services run on—increasingly large data centers being built at increasing rates—has a huge economic and environmental footprint, one which is scaling in proportion with AI itself—that is to say, exponentially. We are recklessly pouring labor, resources, our physical and mental health, our very humanity at an accelerating pace into a silicon god which promises us a world freed from the need to work, to think, to experience uncertainty or ambiguity, to interact with other human beings.

But this promised world, I believe, is a mirage. It seems attainably close, but never seems to get any closer, no matter how many billions of dollars of funding we pour into keeping OpenAI and Anthropic afloat, how many hallucinations we put up with, how much electricity we burn and water we evaporate and silicon we feed this ravenous beast. If we want to see what the generative AI "revolution" is really doing, we need to see through the empty stories of its champions and think clearly about what is happening and what it means. I hope to do this, in some small way, in the coming posts.