I understand this perspective, I believe. Greed, dehumanization and prioritizing profits over communities are some of the worst elements of the AI situation and hardly unique to it. That suggests AI is just one example of a larger political problem.

But AI is also uniquely bad on its on terms. It is a fundamentally unreliable technology. It is rooted in plagiarism and requires unethical practices to build, to maintain and to use. It is environmentally disastrous. It is mentally damaging, creating cognitive debt in those that use it for many tasks. It is damaging and insulting to artists. It creates a specific, if not yet fully understood, psychosis in certain at risk individuals.

LLMs, and more accurately the corporate drive for its sudden mass adoption, is exemplary of corporate greed and reckless companies trying to stick working class people with the bill for their terrible bet. It is exemplary of the eternal folly of people to want confirmation of their own biases rather than actual info. But its also a technological dead end built from shady and unreliable practices at the expense of our world and the people in it.

Its not new I don’t think, but my book club read “The Last Murder at the End of the World” by Stuart Turton this year and I loved it.

So, let’s just start with the “Fuck ICE” because its obligatory at this juncture.

But aren’t they allowed to do racial profiling, thanks to Kavanaugh Stops? America has legalized that horrific practice. And while racist slurs ARE deeply unprofessional to be sure, and revealing of the hatred at the core of their actions, - these guys SHOOT people dead in the street, and starve/beat detainees in tiny cells. Also, when doing their “job” correctly, they end up deporting innocent people to countries they’ve never lived in. They kill and torture at worst, and ruin innocent lives at best. Is America really so ass-backwards someone is going to get some of them in trouble for “no-no words”? Please tell me this is a media problem and someone, somewhere is actually doing something useful, I just don’t get to hear about it.