I have mixed feelings about most things in life. My brain likes to think it understands both sides of most controversial topics, because thats what I di. I think of the positive and negative aspects of things coming from both defences. It has served me well for the most part, and allowed me to be a better tech support or customer support person. When I tell somebody; I understand your view or emotion, I really believe I do. Not always exactly the same way they do, but I always try to understand where they are ccoming from. Annoying complainers always feel justified, because they have a legitimate complaint. Not everyone expresses frustration the same way.
The current big debate in our world is the surprise introduction of AI technologies. I call it a surprise because to most people, it will impact them suddenly and in most cases, substantially at some point. It may have already changed their life, or it almost certainly will at some point in the future. Nobody can ever really predict how significantly their every day lives will be different when a new technology enters into theri orbit. People who try to predict it often look foolish with the under-estimated ideas. The home computer was almost never used to enter recipes as we were promised, but today we can’t imagine life without a computer, or a cell phone, or a TV. AI is not just one new technology that will have impact and influence, it is everything. It is unavoidable, n matter how much people will try to stay away.
Because it is such a wide concept, it’s hard to mentally wrap our heads around the changes that will happen over the next day, week, year or lifetime. This includes many wonderful things along with truly horrific uses that will be discovered over time. It is a monster that we will regret unleasing on a Tuesday and a savior on a Thirsday. It will the cause of, and solution to many of life’s problems. Some wil be involuntary disruptions and some will fundimentally change the entire society. Some will happen slowly as we learn, and it learns the structure of thought, and careers, and artisttry and some have already taken over with both positive and negative results.
And a phrase I hear over and over is, today we are seeing the worst of what it will be. I don’t fully agree with that as an absolute statement. It is used to explain that today’s version will only improve with time, but I think it could get, and almost certainly will get much worse in time. Humans are really not ready for the creative uses that the world’s evil people will find for AI. Greed and crime don’t go away. We just find out about them after they have devistated somebody who was optomistic and innocent. I will always remember the moment I told a classsroom full of eager Internet beginners that I didn’t forsee spam emails being too much of an issue because in my heart, I did not fully comprehend the mindset of people who don’t care about people if there is a way to profit off them. The shere amount of people currently sitting in entire office buildings acting as scam callers trying to steal money from others is staggering, and quite sad. For a meager paycheck, they choose to steal from people on the phone, dozens of times an hour, over and over.
I accept this as a truth, but it still boggles my mind how easy it becomes for them to sign away conscience.
As a great deal of my personal life has been enriched by generative AI and AI “vibe” coding, I embrace our new AI Overlords, and promote positive uses for it, and I will continue to do so, right up until the the day it screws me. I honestly believe that I am not personally taking jobs and money out of the hands of people that would normally charge for the things I am letting AI develop for me at no cost because I would not be paying for such things anyway. If I did not have AI image and video creation, or AI assisted programming tools, then I would not be doing either of those things. I would have a different hobby.
At the same time, I can not deny that greed wins over kindness in business and there are certainly many business examples where creative work has been outsourced to computers and income moved from the artist and designer community into the profit coulms on business spreadsheets. So many things that may have cost $100 or $1000 or $10,000 to finance a comfortable life for creative humans is now generated by a prompt. I get that. It is a bad concequence that will be remembered by future societies. A huge shift, not disimilar to the job changes required after other major advancements. Almost evry invention of every product designeed to make our lives better, does so at the cost of the people that used to do those things for us. Computers changed so many things and entire populations of accountants and musicians and support staff were re-allocated to other jobs. This time it’s much bigger an issue but it’s not totally new.
AI has enriched my life in a great way. I’m a creative person that wasn’t able to use a lot of that talent becaue my brain was horrible at practice and my need to be good at things I try stopped me before I wasted energy on things I expected to fail at. I now write music, create comics, make cool videos and write programs to help me with my work, and share with others. I am not directly effected by the negative aspects so I consider it good. I don’t think that makes me a bad person. I’m not comparible to a scam call center stealing literal life fortunes, but I am aware it will be used in those ways too.
I pick my battles. Evil exists either way. It’s the the flip side of advancement. Both good and bad are enhanced, and there will be consequences. Denial is the worst option. Get on the bandwagon early and accept what that means for you, and others.
I reserve the right to apologize when everthing hits the fan one day. Judgement day.
