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.

My Mixed Feelings About AI

I find myself torn when it comes to artificial intelligence. On one hand, I’m genuinely amazed by its possibilities; on the other, I’m deeply concerned about its implications. I’ll admit I’m perhaps more fascinated than worried, which sometimes makes me wonder if I should be more cautious.

Why I’m Concerned

My worries stem largely from the perspective of thinkers like Aurélien Barrau, a French astrophysicist, poet, and environmental activist whose work I deeply respect. He argues that without a fundamental shift in our philosophy of living, our current climate and ecological crisis will only worsen. As long as we prioritize capitalist growth over meaningful human relationships and planetary health, technology—including AI—becomes part of the problem rather than the solution.

Barrau identifies several key concerns that resonate with me:

Geopolitical and military risks: AI could encourage us to delegate critical decisions to machines, especially when speed seems more important than wisdom.

Techno-solutionism: The dangerous belief that technology alone can solve all our problems, when what we really need is to fundamentally rethink our values and way of life.

Social alienation: The potential for AI to isolate us further from genuine human connection and community.

As Barrau puts it: “We’ve built a system where prioritizing life over money appears extreme.” His perspective really captures something profound about our current predicament.

Why I’m Still Fascinated

Despite these concerns, I can’t help but be impressed by AI’s rapid progress. Critics who claimed certain capabilities were impossible have been proven wrong time and again.

I’ve been experimenting with AI as a creative assistant in several areas:

Music: Tools like Suno AI let me generate songs that, while perhaps not professional-quality, are genuinely impressive for someone without formal musical training. I’ll even confess I’ve created a few songs glorifying myself—guilty as charged!

Writing: I’m working on several fantasy and fiction projects that involve extensive worldbuilding—creating detailed magic systems, languages, currencies, characters, and entire civilizations. This process used to take forever, but AI assistance has dramatically accelerated my workflow while still letting me maintain creative control.

Programming: AI excels at repetitive, pattern-based tasks. For instance, it’s revolutionized how I handle database seeding—no more lorem ipsum! I can describe a data model and get realistic test data generated automatically. It’s also made documentation much easier for someone whose native language isn’t English, and I use it to create technical cheat sheets for tools I use occasionally but can’t memorize.

Finding Balance

I don’t want AI to do everything for me—I see myself more as a conductor, guiding and infusing soul into the building blocks that AI helps generate. My hope, perhaps utopian, is that AI can truly serve all of humanity while addressing the ecological concerns that make its development sustainable.

The challenge isn’t the technology itself, but ensuring we develop and deploy it in ways that enhance rather than diminish our humanity and our planet’s health.

As far as using it as a developer, I do not have a very positive view of AI. I use the fancy auto-complete to deal with boilerplate but otherwise I never do anything like “Write a function that does X” because thinking through those problems and designing code are my favourite parts of programming. I don’t care that it’s slower and in my view tools that allow less people to ship more bloated software at a faster rate isn’t a good thing. Speeding up your side-project so you can have more time with your family is a much different thing, of course, but that gets into the question of if the time saved will actually be used to do something or just be used to spend more time on the computer (remember when computers were supposed to make us work less?)

If it gets to the point where I can’t get a job because I refuse to “vibe code” or offload everything to an agent then I’ll very likely be leaving the industry.