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@bert_hubert A neighbour got into an argument with me about my electric car's battery and the way its production is harmful to the environment and how this harm will never be offsetted over its lifetime compared to the long life a fossil fuel car.
The two-person household of that same neighbour and his wife owns five different fossil fuel cars parked on their property.
The Apollo Project of our generation should have been fighting climate change.
But those in power are telling us now that it's AI, instead. It's inevitable, they say, we should happily embrace this.
It's this betrayal that makes all of this so disgusting.
And now? It took the world a finger-snap to go all-in on AI. We were capable to decide this. To literally throw trillions of cash and resources into this. Only that this is the modern equivalent of investing into a tulip bulb merchant who is promising us a future black tulip flower.
Governments and corporations told us that a rapid transition away from fossil fuels was an unreasonable and naive demand. It was impossible to rebuild the economy around this idea. It was impossible to implement.
These climate events had been accurately predicted decades ago. We had technologies to prevent the scale of this - renewable energy, batteries, electric cars, etc. - ready for a large-scale roll-out long ago. We had discussions, actual proposals, plans and budget estimates to do this since 30+ years.
We currently find ourselves in an escalating climate catastrophe that everyone can witness to have real consequences. The new normal in Europe is droughts, wildfires and heatwaves. We have petrostates engaged in multiple idiotic wars and trade conflicts that dismantle our global supply chains. We're seeing lower crop yields and coming food shortages. We have a realistic outlook to see the end of AMOC in our lifetime.
The moment corporations started to believe that a machine will make annoying workers easily replaceable or even unnecessary, the moment organizations found out that using AI offers plausible deniability for difficult decisions that can potentially hurt other humans, it took the people in power an *instant* to redirect all of our attention into advancing this technology.
We hastily rebuild our society and economy around it. We're told we'll be left behind if we don't accept to include AI in our workplace, our kid's schools, the culture we consume, the bureaucracy we rely on, the military decisions on how to fight our wars, and so on.
"There will be a human in the loop" the proponents are telling the public. And yet this is how the same industry sold us self-driving-cars: "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself."
The visceral disgust for the technology doesn't come from its obvious niche usefulness. But from its externalised costs we're told to ignore to embrace it.
What do we have here? We have combined a massive problem space fuzzer with an addictive Clever Hans Effect machine. Tech bros are successfully lying to the public about it having magical capabilities.
A good friend who's vibe coding now tells me I'm talking like a blind person about colours when arguing to reject generative AI without "really" trying it out first myself.
The issue isn't if generative AI can be useful for highly specific work and operated by experts for that task. Generative AI is a genuinely impressive and fun tool. Especially in prototyping and security fuzzing. But it still causes a deep feeling of disgust, at least for me.
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@masek/117291737816399540
Reading a lot of nuanced takes now about the usefulness of generative AI by very smart people I respect a lot, such as this thread that is very much worth your time.
And yet... 🧵