I am surrounded by people who are scared of artificial intelligence. People who fear it will take their jobs. People who fear it is eroding intimacy. People who fear it is ruining education. People who fear it is destroying the environment. And on and on and on.
Among all of those people, I am probably the most advanced and sophisticated user of artificial intelligence. This isn’t a boast. It’s an objective description of truth. Whatever you may think, whatever I may think of the virtues and vices of artificial intelligence, I’ve used it more than just about everyone I know to do more than just about anyone I know. I’ve vibe-coded a genuinely commercializable product. I’ve organized gigs of data, pornographic and otherwise. I’ve rebuilt multiple blogs and content management systems as well as CRMs. In short, I’ve spent hundreds — at this point, if not thousands — of hours working with AI and using it to great effect. I’ve also spent a lot of time and energy reading about and learning about how it’s affecting the world: the environmental impact, its electricity consumption, its water consumption, its effect on jobs.
In general, though you might not know it to read this blog, I’m pretty humble when it comes to assessing my own knowledge about just about anything. Here’s a very brief summary of my conclusions about all this stuff as of today, offered with the caveat that I really don’t purport to know much of anything with anything resembling certainty:
On the environmental question, my strong hunch is that while AI consumes huge quantities of electricity, AI companies, in their voracious appetites, have found it in their interest to bring all sorts of renewable energy generation capacity online. So I don’t really know how to think about the net impact of that. Similarly with respect to water: while there’s unquestionably tons of water required to cool data centers, the incentives to do so efficiently are pretty great. And in many parts of the country, water is not actually scarce. So here too, I’m pretty agnostic as to whether AI’s thirst is destructive, neutral, or even beneficial. I just don’t know.
There are all sorts of other questions about the impacts of AI — the cultural impacts, the employment impacts. History is filled with tales of technology disrupting marketplaces and restructuring labor and employment. It seems reasonable to me to imagine that AI will do that once again. It seems unreasonable to me to imagine that we can possibly know much about what that will look like from where we sit today. One thing I’m certain of: the fantasies of the tech bros that somehow AI is going to make us all so fabulously wealthy that we won’t need to work anymore reflects a pretty radical misunderstanding of human nature. Notwithstanding the fact that it’s called “work” and that many people do aspire to retire or not to work, the truth is the vast majority of humans, given the opportunity, do choose to work. Whether because of greed or ambition or pathology, it’s pretty damn unusual for humans simply to stop working when they “have enough money.” That really isn’t a thing. People want more money. People like to keep working. So we just do. So I’m not really buying the fantastical predictions of utopia around the corner.
There are two things, though, that I feel like I do have something approaching certainty concerning with respect to AI:
One: unquestionably, it will enable unimaginable good. It will solve diseases, cure diseases, develop medications, solve previously intractable scientific, political, and other problems. I have no doubt about that. The rapidity with which it’s knocking down math problems and scientific problems has me convinced of this.
At the same time, it seems to me unreasonable to imagine that any such good outcome won’t likely be paired with an equal and offsetting bad phenomenon. The rapidity with which it’s exceeding both our understanding and our control has me terrified. I heard myself say earlier today that just as 9/11 and COVID ushered in changes virtually overnight that were unimaginable even a day or two before, so too will AI bring us to new wonderful and horrible places over the next hours, days, weeks, and months. I have no idea what that will look like. No idea what the positive examples will be or what the negative ones will be, but I’m pretty confident they’re coming — that one way or another, we’re going to be shocked by how differently we live our lives, in ways good and bad, in the very near future.
And yes, it scares the shit out of me.
Featured image prompt (gemini): Dimly lit server room corridor, shot on 35mm film with a wide-angle lens, deep blue and amber light bleeding from floor-level indicator strips across concrete walls lined with black equipment racks, a single bare overhead fluorescent tube flickering at the far end, cables thick as rope snaking along the floor toward something out of frame, faint condensation on a glass panel reflecting the lights back doubled and distorted, the perspective slightly tilted so the vanishing point feels unstable, the whole scene saturated in cold blue with one wrong warm patch glowing at the center, silent and enormous and indifferent, no person, no text, only the hum you can almost hear.
Bottom image prompt (openai): Large-format color photograph, shot on 8×10 film with a single harsh overhead fluorescent tube casting hard shadows downward. A bald man in his fifties — close-cropped beard, two small earrings, glasses — sits alone at a cluttered home-office desk buried under open laptops, their screens throwing cold blue-white light up against his face from below while the fluorescent cuts down from above, the two light sources fighting each other wrongly. He is turned slightly away, face half-resolved, one hand resting on a keyboard, not typing — just stopped. The glow from the screens is too bright, clinical, almost surgical, and the shadows it carves into his face sit at an angle that feels slightly off. Behind him, through a dark window, the ambient light of a city night is a flat, sourceless amber — warm against the room’s cold — and the scale of that darkness makes the desk, the screens, and the man look very small inside it.