Fuck AI

I would say that THIS is the biggest risk of AI. its not what it does, its what people believe it does. Especially people who aren't capable of actually assessing its performance.

I think it’s actually just the perception that it’s doing that from people who are so far away from the working that they don’t have any clue.

Like 300 years ago if you wanted to be a sailor maybe you started by rowing oars, or swabbing decks or dealing with ropes and rigging or whatever. If you’re a 19 year old seaman in 2026 you’re probably using a throttle controller that’s 26 different systems disconnected from the actual mechanical work. No one says “oh that guys not a novice seaman” or “the boat literally drives itself hurr”

If you’re a graphic designer in 1970, you’d cut out and hand lay a magazine page out on a big glowing table, page by page, resetting the type so it fit along with giant physical images so you could design the page. In 2026, you’d use Illustrator and lay it out on your computer. No one says “oh the magazines just lay themselves out” or “that’s not how you lay out magazine”. It’s just done with the tools available.

What’s going on is very few people seem to understand the difference between a tool and a solution. A tool is a thing that does something. A hammer is a tool. A solution is something that solves a problem. A hammer is a tool but it is not a good solution for a crying baby. Applying random tools to non-problems does not generate solutions randomly, it just creates even more intractable problems.

It probably depends on your industry but it absolutely cannot even do entry level work in a lot of fields.

I agree, and that's a great way of putting it. We're kneecapping ourselves collectively because enough individual companies are deprecating the junior dev experience. We'll see if it holds up when senior devs are in such short supply that companies have to pay them 4x the margin they saved on junior devs. I think they're hoping that the machine learning gets good enough to do senior dev work before the humans retire. Or else they're just line-go-up types

Ha true. I guess all I can do is try to teach the Young's to get out from the grip of corpo net and become tech literate. That alone would solve a massive amount of issues and give corps wayyyy less power.

Then also teach them to look inward, have empathy, and think critically.

It doesn't seem like a lot...

I love that you said that and to bring this back to a deeply political point, the entire framing of AI assumes we have a severe shortage of human minds that are not being used to anywhere near their full potential.

You can't argue that enhancing two college students with 10 academic AIs is necessary because there aren't enough prospective students while we simultaneously cast immigrants back into the ocean as they try to immigrate to our countries and attend our universities to start lives they could never have imagined back home for whatever reason does it really matter 99.999% of the time? You can't argue the use of AI is necessary because we just don't have enough intelligence when there are homeless everywhere who are given no outlet by society to use their minds productively despite abundant evidence that structuring society this way only hurts ALL of our potential for intelligence both individually and collectively.

You can't argue that we need to pursue intelligence as a virtue over all else, whatever the hell that means anyways... and then ignore the incredible dehumanization so many people feel in their workplaces and that materially diminishes their potential for applied intelligence in a collective organization.

I am disgusted by this bifurcation of our valuing of human beings and our valuing of intelligence irrespective of how cool and interesting the idea is in the abstract of a sentient computer. I love Data, but Data would be shitting on all of the computer science focused people I see featured prominently in society and who are given billions and billions of dollars to piss away in vain cathedrals of bullshit. Data wouldn't have time for this, he would be out punching AR-15 toting ICE thugs in the face as they were attempting to kidnap children because in the end it is always children that are the source of intelligence, after all if adults already knew how to do it then it wouldn't be labelled the accolade of intelligent in the first place right? The thing with intelligence is it just takes a bit of time and care... something these "masters of intelligence" seem to have a pretty artificial understanding of.

My favourite cheating story was when a friend was permitted to take a couple of revision cards of notes into her final exam (as much as you could fit on the cards — one dude took a microscope into his exam, but that is fairly common, apparently). My friend had a form of synaesthesia that meant that whenever she saw letters, she saw colours. Each letter (and number, I think) had its own distinctive colour.

So what she did was she wrote her notes in colour, allowing her to encode an entire additional layer of information. So let's say the letters in the word "carbon" appeared to her as being red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, then she could write the word oxygen with the "o" in red, the "x" in orange", the "y" in yellow etc., and end up with something that a normal person would read as "oxygen", but she would be able to read it as "oxygen" and "carbon" simultaneously. Apparently it took work to be able to efficiently read two layers of information at once (or to focus on one layer and not be distracted by the other), but she started playing around with this back in highschool. She told me that the hardest part of this process was finding some coloured fineliners that were precisely the right colour for each letter.

However, she found that she was unsatisfied with the amount of extra information she was able to encode in this way. So instead, she broke down each letter into multiple chunks. So if she wrote the letter "o" in "oxygen" using 3 different colours (red, orange and yellow", and the "x" with "green, blue, purple", then she has managed to encode the entire word "carbon" into the space of only two letters. In the end, I think she was able to encode 6-8 times the information density into her permitted notes.

But the most funny thing about this is that producing these notes took so much effort and focus that she accidentally learned the content so well she didn't even need the notes. Task failed successfully, I guess? (If the task was writing some useful notes using this weird brain quirk or hers). She was salty at first at the wasted effort of making the notes, but I think she was glad to get to have such an absurd project

I can't imagine what it must be like to perceive the world like that. It really cooks my brain. I remember I once wrote down a word in regular black ink, and asked her what colours it appeared as. Then I wrote down the same word but in red ink, and asked her if she could tell that it was red, and whether she could simultaneously still see the same colours as before. She told me that yes, she could, and honestly, my mind is blown anew every time I think of this.

Gosh, that was longer than I expected. It was fun to write though. I hope at least one person finds it fun to read too.

I’ve heard of writing on the inside of a water bottle label. But the soda is genius as you have to tilt to reveal it, otherwise it remains hidden.

I feel the effect when it happens as I am required to use AI in my work. I have to acknowledge it and take steps to not offload memorizing and analysis of things solely to an AI assistant. Mitigating this impact takes time and effort. The danger is that AI is good enough that the gains in speed may outweigh the risks and the cost of errors. If the efficiency is high enough, meeting the performance output standards required to hold a position at a company will not be possible without using AI and doing so in a way that makes it impossible to mitigate the formation of dependencies. People will have to use AI in a way that ensures dependency in order to have the job. The costs are bourne by the workers, the benefits reaped by the owners.

That's the leverage that will reshape our society, we will be forced to work in ways that make us worse at learning, memorization and analysis. Ask a product owner a question and they have to reach for AI because the environment makes it impossible to have the answer without it. And if they can get the answer from AI, so can the person asking the question. So with AI adoption, leadership, decision making and expertise are all transfered to ownership, decimating those middle roles between implementation and ownership that the entire office environment is built around. They're also trying to use it to replace implementation as well, as with software engineers.

For business, AI is a massive opportunity to reduce their dependency on human labour, while making remaining labour dependent on AI. It's a nightmare for a society and for human beings. If robotics manages to accelerate alongside, then what is a population even capable of doing to protect themselves from the harm of this corporate empowerment? No jobs, no money, no legal access to resources and facing an autonomous robotic security system protecting those resources?

History shows self-interest and concentrated power leads to mass suffering. I don't see how these new technologies, in the hands private power, will produce anything different this time.

Yeah, that's a good point. They did a lot more work on their own needs, their surroundings, and their family/tribe. They did zero work grinding away at some mind-numbing task to make somebody else rich.