I used to think AI had some legitimate benefits. Mostly in areas like healthcare. I still believe that it’s likely to be beneficial in that one specific instance. But I started getting the feeling recently that the capitalist class are using the very few actually useful scenarios for AI as a way to sell their dystopian vision for the technology to people who are otherwise rightly sceptical.
There have been recent reports about how even students at top universities (in western countries I believe, which makes sense) have been relying on AI to write their entire coursework projects for them. If it’s happening in those institutions, imagine what’s happening at high schools. This is my impression of the conservative approach to education through and through, but on steroids. Students learn very little (or in this case, basically nothing), but they get an oh so useful piece of paper saying they passed, which will surely prepare them for life in the workplace. When I left college in the early 2000s, I didn’t feel prepared for a job; and there was no AI back then. It would have been hard to cheat on assignments too, although I’m sure some tried copying and pasting from Wikipedia or something. It illustrates that conservatives never really cared about true education. They always just wanted to create the next generation of obedient worker drones who don’t ask questions, do jobs they’re overqualified for, so they can keep their pay and level of power to challenge the system suppressed as much as possible. And try to push as many people as possible into the financial sector. Simultaneously killing true education as well as the arts. Slowly but surely so people barely noticed for decades (until about now).
So I suppose we can say that AI is the natural next step conservatives want us to take. They want us to be even more incurious than before. And I feel like I’m noticing this everywhere. People are often unwilling to even look up the most basic of facts in a search engine these days. Let alone find an answer in a book while researching the old fashioned way. I’ve been talking to people on services like Bluesky, and they won’t have even bothered to look at my profile to see I call myself a degrowth communist. They’ll be surprised a few days later when I bring it up once I suspect they haven’t seen. And these are otherwise very smart and switched-on people. If they’re acting in this way, what are Trump / Reform voters doing? They’re seemingly waiting to be told what to think and feel. Ash Sarkar said essentially this on Novara Live last week, and it got me thinking about this topic.
Speaking of search engines, that brings me to my next point. People are using AI chatbots as replacements for traditional search engines like Google (or DuckDuckGo, which I’ve switched to recently). This is clearly excessive. Search engines do the job for us perfectly fine. They’re not as conversational, but they work. There’s no real benefit to using AI in this way. In fact, it’s objectively worse. For example, as we’ve seen in a recent story, Grok, which is Elon Musk’s AI built into X, has been giving answers which have clearly been manipulated by an employee at X. Potentially Musk himself. If AI is not truly independently intelligent, and instead just parrots the ideology of its creators, then how can any of us take it seriously and trust its answers? With a search engine, you are shown a list of independent websites best placed to answer your question or provide the information you’re looking for. I know search providers can manipulate this, but generally speaking it’s still decent. With AI, people are often taking the paragraph or so of text it churns out as gospel. If they even bother to look up the thing at all. This is incredibly dangerous for society when opinion is being presented as fact, or if a bug causes incorrect information to be presented as fact too. It doesn’t have to be deliberate to be disastrous. Of course, even search engines are integrating AI answers now. On DuckDuckGo, and most other search engines, you can turn it off, which is good. But how long are these companies going to give us the option?
And this is another massive problem with AI. The energy consumption. An AI search request uses around 10 times more energy than a Google search, for example. This is something that we absolutely can’t afford to scale up to all web searches, for obvious reasons. We’re already destroying our climate and environment at a rapid pace. Are we determined to put ourselves out of our misery faster? Is that it? Or is it just incredible levels of stupidity that has pushed us into doing the worst possible things at the worst possible time?
As I said earlier, there are a few legitimate areas of society where AI can improve our lives in a tangible way. But I’m not willing to implement those at any cost. If we limited the scope of AI purely to these areas, such as healthcare; then fair enough. But that can only happen under a socialist or communist society. As long as the capitalists are in charge, we’re going to get a nightmarish implementation of AI that we really don’t want. And it doesn’t have to include a Terminator style robot uprising for that to be the case. The acceleration of the dumbing down of society, and the additional climate damage being caused are nightmarish enough. And I haven’t even mentioned autonomy taking people’s jobs. That’s a whole other topic that gets endlessly written about.
I’ve been boycotting AI for years already. Everyone else who cares about our future needs to do the same. It’s getting progressively more difficult to avoid, but we just have to stay one step ahead. If that means switching email provider, or not using a social network, switching to a different type of smartphone; or even stopping using a smartphone altogether; we have to do it.
