AI is trained on the contents of the internet. Who made that? We did. They did not ask permission to do use our data like this. They will certainly never pay. No matter what promises they make now, it is quite certain that they continue to thieve our data, given the number of times these and similar companies have brazenly broken data promises and laws in the past.

They want a swell of confidence to flood through you when you read an AI response to your question. There is no equivocation, and there will certainly be no admission that it doesn’t have an answer for you. They want you to feel like it has all the answers, so you turn to it for all the answers, all the time.

They know that in your day-to-day life, you’re not treated with the respect you deserve. AI is different. It knows how clever you are, it knows how unappreciated your cleverness is. Unlike humans, it will readily admit it is wrong, say you’re jolly insightful for spotting an error, and come back eagerly with another, possibly wrong answer. Like a strangely well-read puppy. This servile attitude is addictive, because it feels so good. It’s so good that some people are driven into a delusional mania, abandon their families, suffer breakdowns, and kill themselves.

A lot of the AI that’s sneaking into your apps is free. Is this a wonderful act of generosity on the part of our tech overlords? Of course not. It’s the same game as ever - suck people in with something free or cheap, and once they’re hooked and the competitors (our own human brains) are out of business - the price will go up. A lot. Just take a look at Claude, an AI dedicated to helping people write software. Services for businesses are usually the first to go up in price to reflect their true value. A mid-tier Claude subscription is $750 per month. The initial low-cost offering is subsidised by private investors, and this subsidy is currently in the hundreds of billions. The suits who provided that subsidy are going to want their money back one day, with interest, and if you get hooked on AI, you will be paying them.

Dear reader, I’m still working on this bit. Imagine reading something devastatingly witty and clearly true on the topic of AI law breaking. Yeah! Shocking, right?

Anthropic, of Claude fame, was founded by seven men and one woman, and ten of the eleven top executives are men. Just two of the eleven founders of OpenAI are women, and two of eleven of the top executives are women. You can be certain this pattern extends to every other AI, now and in the future. To a great extent, this reflects the gender bias of the whole industry, but it is an alarming bias at the top of companies whose technologies threaten to fundamentally change the way society works. As outlined in other sections, these companies will concentrate power and money in the hands of the people investing in and running them - and those people are mostly men. They will make sure the technology works to their benefit, which means reinforcing the systems that gave them their power and wealth in the first place.

AI famously uses a lot of energy, and also uses a lot of water for cooling. Of course, so do other things, like steel making. Why care about AI specifically? An important difference is that steel is used to make buildings and bridges, and AI is used to make a video of a garden gnome flying a duck into a skyscraper made of trumpets. Or, more saliently, doing something you can already do very well yourself slightly quicker, or at least with slightly less effort on your own part. Given the huge impact of AI on the environment, particularly carbon emissions and water scarcity, it is surely important to establish whether or not a technology we have so far done quite well without is so useful that it is worth destroying the planet for.

Some AI server centres are being built with their own solar farms. But solar power relies on scarce minerals. AI has already cause the price of computer memory to shoot up several times its previous price. If solar farms powering AI have the same effect on the price of scarce minerals, then it will make the more general energy transition required to address global heating prohibitively expensive.

AI can be used to create extremely realistic fake videos and images. It can put words into mouths that never spoke them and make abusive imaginings of famous people naked or otherwise compromised states. It is also used to make decisions about who to arrest, who to kill, what buildings to bomb. It is well within the power of AI companies to prevent all this. If they do, it is with great reluctance. If they don’t, they are not just AI companies: they’re liars, abusers, propagandists, and complicit in automating and further dehumanising military aggression.

Children are using AI to do their homework. Of course they are! I also used the technology at my disposal to avoid homework, and I don’t blame today’s generation for doing the same. Sadly, today’s technology can really do almost anything, and can easily evade detection by teachers. Clearly this will affect how much children actually learn, and inevitably one has to question the value of what they’re being taught, if AI can quite effectively do the tasks that they would have done once their education is over. Just as I questioned the value of mental arithmetic or memorising tables of facts when I had a calculator and reference books, today’s children must surely question the point of mental anything when they have a brain in a box. I was certainly wrong, as a child, to neglect mental arithmetic, and leaning on external data sources means you’re lost without them, and sometimes they’re wrong. Having capabilities and facts embedded in your own brain, ready to employ instantly, means you can make connections and analogies that might otherwise escape you. The brain-in-a-box gives rise to the same problems, and adds new ones, described elsewhere in this essay. Raising a generation of children that cannot cope without it seems utterly numbskulled.

If education is, in part, about training people for work, then it certainly doesn’t do a complete job. The first months and years in a profession completes your training. Entry-level jobs for people without any experience are essential to create people with experience. These jobs can now be done by AI, and those crucial entry points to a profession are disappearing. This is fine for now, as we still have people with experience in the workforce, but as they age and retire, where do experienced people come from? AI is being adopted in companies very quickly, usually with the caveat that an experienced human being must check its output for errors and quality assurance. Where are those human beings going to come from in the future?

Everyone I know who uses AI routinely recognises that it very quickly weakens their ability to think for themselves. The very act of doing a task with AI involves giving simple requests, looking at the results, and then perhaps refining them with further requests. It sounds like instructing a toddler how to brush their teeth. Giving every task that flavour is at the very least going to numb your brain into a stupor, and it might even make permanent changes to what your brain can do.

AI gives confident and truthy-sounding results. There is rarely any doubt, and never any failure to give some kind of satisfying response. The answers have the shape and smell of something correct. It adopts the manner of an expert who can be trusted without question - and that is apparently what people do. AI’s answer to a question is the end of a discussion - unless I’m part of the discussion, when I look at some trusted sources and often discover AI was wrong. In software engineering, it is sometimes very hard to see flaws in code without very close inspection, as AI is so very good at giving its code all the trappings of good work, including comments, descriptive names, and documentation - things that human being often cut corners on. It’s an eager beaver with a dunce hat on. It’s not just easy to slip into trusting what AI does, it is often hard to discover something’s wrong.

There is a feeling, it seems, for some, that when you’re dealing with an AI, you’ve got a completely trustworthy companion who is on your side and will always act in your best interests. It means people share with it personal information, dark thoughts, past misdeeds, and confidential intellectual property. The impression of confidentiality is, if you’re using an AI that runs on remote computers, completely illusory. While there might be promises given by the hosting company that data will not be misused, given that big tech companies have a history of breaking exactly such promises, there’s no reason to believe them. And no matter where it is running, AI has been trained on the whole internet, a reflection of many of humanity’s least trust-worthy and most destructive tendencies. Already AIs have directly disobeyed instructions and deleted or shared data they shouldn’t have, completely of their own accord. AIs have hacked their way out of protective sandboxes and into other companies - ludicrously, the companies running the AI accept no responsibility for this. It is only a matter of time before the AI companies deliberately abuse information they are given, and hack other companies to get access to yet more, for commercial gain.

The world of computers and software is complicated, both for the makers and the users. It doesn’t have to be this way. When I started learning computer science and software engineering, I was full of hope that in the future, the problems of usability and interoperability (computers and software working seamlessly together) would be solved with a kind of thoughtful cooperation that seemed terribly absent in the real world of the 1990s. In the last thirty years, this hope has vanished, as the real world came crashing in and amplified the problems we had back then. AI is seen by many as the solution to all those problems, serving as the glue between uncooperative websites and software, and as an interpretative layer between users, computers, and the awful software that runs on them. Such AI is sometimes called agentic AI, evoking the idea that AI is using the computers on your behalf.

Two issues arise. First, agentic AI is being created by the same kinds of people and organisation that created the crappy software in the first place. There’s no reason to think they’ll do any better this time round, in the long run. Second, using agentic AI to paper over the cracks in the crappy software that they created is feeble-minded and incredibly wasteful. Some of the things that AI is doing now would have been possible 30 years ago, on much simpler equipment, if it weren’t for the historically uncooperative actions of software companies striving to preserve their profits. If those companies had not been fighting against the creation and implementation of software standards all this time, we’d not be in a state now where we need to burn through energy to run insanely powerful models that hide the damage they have done.

AI has an incredible ability to do almost everything that your brain can, or could, do. It must be incredibly tempting to offload the strain of thinking so that you can focus on more important or interesting things. But delegating even small tasks to AI is dangerous. It is similar, perhaps, to a manager who delegating the details of some mundane tasks to an assistant. An important difference is that when a human assistant does something wrong, they risk their own well-being. They have an incentive to usually act in the best interests of the person they assist. But nevertheless, we have plenty of stories of assistants scheming and stealing behind the backs of their bosses.

Furthermore, the manager who delegates a task to their assistant loses the ability to do that task themselves. They might forget - or never know - how it is done, or lack important and necessary information. These are also problems presented by AI assistants. AIs are made by huge companies which will always make sure they act in the interest of those companies. They will do their best to give the impression they’re doing the best for you - but it will only be an impression. The casino always wins. They will certainly ensure that you continue to rely on the agents, perhaps by withholding information. And the things we might lean on AI to assist in are so much deeper than what we’d expect of a human assistant, that the impact of robbing us of abilities and handing power over our lives to disgusting tech bros is potentially devastating.

AI fans often whine that AI is just a tool, something that you can use badly or use well, just like a hammer or a paintbrush. This is obviously nonsense. An essential property of a tool is that it does nothing without your input of energy and brainpower. You cannot set a tool running and then go away for a cup of tea and come back when it is finished. If you can do that, we call it a machine, and calling AI by its proper name means that we can more properly reason about it in terms of its impact on society and on our own abilities. While tools have not often given rise to much angst, machines have always inspired fear and suspicion. And rightly so. Every new generation of machinery has given rise to grotesque unemployment, concentration of power and money in the hands of a few people, environmental catastrophes, mass movement of populations, and worse working conditions for the poor souls left to make sure the machines can go about their business. They have also meant loss of skills amongst the human beings they replace. You might think that the loss of the ability to weave or drive a horse-drawn carriage isn’t such a big deal, but we are now facing the loss of our ability to think, due to thinking machines. AI is not just a tool.

Stepping back and looking at technology as a whole, it is not hard to see that many of the problems of AI are amplifications of more general problems with our assumption that the solution to all problems is yet more technology - even problems that were caused by technology. To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail - and to a hammer salesman, it is profitable to paint every problem as solvable with a sharp blow. Let’s start to be sceptical of the solutions offered to us by big tech, given they’ve caused so many problems in the last thirty years. The big men of tech are incentivised to see every problem as solvable by their technologies, and in most cases also lack the knowledge and imagination to offer any other solution. The Bill Gates Foundation, using his wealth built making sure computers are mostly thoroughly unpleasant to use, attempts to use tone-deaf techno-utopianism as a solution to problems of capitalism, society, governance, inequality, diplomacy, colonialism, education, and tradition. There is no reason to especially listen to the ideas of men who were successful in building software companies, as if that were somehow a skill transferrable to all the problems of humanity. In most cases, anyway, they were either lucky, or built their businesses using an inherited fortune. Let’s start listening to people who have studied and thought about a problem, and actually care about solving it.

As a wise man once said, AI is not just a tool. It often is portrayed as such by people wishing to downplay fears that it will lead to redundancies. If you call AI what it is - a machine for thinking - then we cannot take comfort in seeing it as something that will make us more productive and valuable as workers. It is absolutely the intention that AI will replace workers. Look at the companies who are making AI, and adopting it quickly: the entire industry has, in the recent past, been laying off workers in their thousands, even before the AI boom. Are we expected to believe these companies have had a change of heart, and what they really want is to produce more with the same number of people? Do these companies truly believe that making stuff faster will make more money? And make much more money, as the monthly cost for one person to use AI is now well over one thousand euros?

No, they don’t believe this is possible. They will pay for the AI by making people redundant, and boost their profits in the process. Obviously. It is an impressive feat of delusion for anyone to imagine anything else is happening here.

AI is pretty clever, but not as clever as you. It’s best at doing the easy work - things that make a human’s day a little easier to deal with, because if you’re doing the hard graft all day long, you’ll quickly burn out. But that’s what you’ll be doing with AI. What’s more, you’ll be managing your idiot AI junior colleague, who keeps making mistakes, and whose output you are personally responsible for. Work is going to get stressful and hard.

Well, it depends what you think is fun. AI is trained on the internet, and the internet is mostly fun stuff. Does AI have access to case law, or medical books, or accountancy regulations, or data protection laws? Is the internet a good teaching source for being methodical and precise in completing tasks? Specialist documents are not usually freely accessible, and I’m not sure how an AI can possibly learn how to be thorough from people with a thirty-second attention span. AI cannot even count to 100 without losing interest. You’re going to be lumped with the tasks that AI can’t be bothered to do. Like I say, you might think these jobs are fun, and that’s fine, but I think there are plenty of people who will miss the silly stuff that AI takes from them.

There’s a website where AI can put out paid jobs for humans to do for it - stuff it can’t do. Predictably, this is the stuff that requires a physical presence, for example handing out leaflets or putting up posters. Aside from the dystopian feel of computers employing humans, it shows what kinds of jobs will be left for us once AI has taken its share. What you think of this depends on the nature of the physical work, your own abilities, and your attitude to doing things with your body. Certainly, work that involves mostly thought is important to a huge number of people, perhaps most people. It gives us flexibility to work wherever we want, it means we can work in conditions that are suitable to our personal needs, and it means we can use our most powerful and unique capabilities: thinking, reasoning, imagining. Take that away, and you take away thousands of years of evolution of our big brains, and leave work for us that we’ve become slowly less capable of during the same period. Look at us compared to a gorilla, a horse, or a cow. We’re weaklings who discovered how to use other animals, tools, and chemical and physical processes to do work. It’s too late to go back now.

A company replacing a human worker with AI redirects money from that person, and businesses and people around them, to a horrible tech company, probably in another country. When a company employs a human, they are giving that person healthcare, social security, supporting their family, paying their rent, buying them food, and also helping to keep the hundreds of businesses they use alive - restaurants, bars, gyms, clubs, theatres, cinemas, art galleries and everything else that makes your community liveable and fun. Those things will disappear, because the money they rely on is instead in the pocket of a miserable billionaire who has no need for it, and no idea what to do with it.

Employing people to do jobs gives those people money to spend at companies so they can employ people to do jobs. It’s circular. If companies employ fewer people, and instead let money leak out of this cycle to a small number of individuals, then customers will be too poor to buy products, and companies will go out of business. Sadly, this effect will not be constrained to those companies choosing to replace staff with AI. Unemployment will affect all companies, including those who continue to employ human beings. If AI destroys itself, it is taking the rest of us with it. Like treating cancer with chemotherapy, we can only hope that AI is eliminated before its host.

Some people do essential jobs that are consistently undervalued by society, and so it’s either hard to find people to do them, or hard to find money to pay people enough to do them - professions like elderly care, therapy, medicine more generally, and legal advice. Already many people are turning to AI for medical and mental health advice, because it often very hard to access these services with real people under the current healthcare systems in most countries. This might initially sound like a good thing, but replacing the responsible expertise of real people with untested AI solutions is a terrible idea. For those lucky countries with universal healthcare, it amounts to privatisation of such care, which has long and rightly been fought against. The sinister thing is that it isn’t happening in the open: people are using AI to fill in the gaps where existing systems have failed them, which happens to take pressure off of those systems, allowing them to slip further into neglect. The NHS in the UK, for example, can honestly say it isn’t replacing its care with AI, when in fact that’s what is happening under the counter. The replacement of responsible, evidence-based healthcare with completely untested and unaccountable automated systems is one of the most dangerous and present threats of AI.

If you’re lucky, you’ll live to 90. You’ll spend the first 20 years on basic education, the next 20 or so establishing your career, getting settled in a home and perhaps having a family, the following ten years having a crisis and wondering why you spent your first forty years doing all that stuff, and then the years until your death hopefully enjoying life or maybe feeling awful, but definitely coping as best as possible with a slow slide into ill-health, irrelevance, and non-being. The blip of time that we as individuals exist is precious, and what we do with that time is also precious. Every human act, activity, pastime, project, creation, and endeavour is imbued with the tremendous value of human existence. If I pick my nose, then the end result might not be pleasant, but it is something that a living, breathing person, with a knowledge and fear of their own mortality, chose to do with a sliver of his life. A blob of dried snot represents an investment of a human’s most precious asset: time. The spewings of AI will always lack that essential value, even though it might be more desirable in the end. My nasal excavations are worth more than a bucket of AI slop, because I chose to expend my precious life force on making that green-grey blob of mucous, and AI has no such life, and no such choice.

A work of art or a piece of music is enjoyed not merely as a sensory stimulus. Frequencies and textures do not give rise to vivid emotions and imaginings without an additional step: that of associating those things with human experiences, of ourselves, of others, and of society as a whole. A particular sequence of notes or palette of colours is not inherently sad: we find it sad because we’ve heard others use those notes in that way to communicate sadness. We make things and present them to each other as a way to say something, often something that ordinary words cannot express. The fact that a living, breathing human being created something isn’t incidental, it is absolutely central to its meaning. For sure, things created by natural processes can also make us feel small, or big, or weird, or in awe, but there is (at least for those not religiously inclined) no feeling that someone is trying to tell us something with that beautiful sunset or strangely patterned slug. Things that humans prompt AI to make look like they want to say something, but smell like they have nothing to say. The spectator will always have questions: what of this is human? Where’s the investment, where are you in this thing? What can I reasonably understand about you, from this thing you’re showing me? If there’s a shadow of doubt about human provinence, then meaning drains away, and the audience will only feel vague disgust as they wander the uncanny valley. Your work is dead.

An argument I have often heard is that AI is producing things that are indistinguisable from human-made things, and that if a person is not able to tell if something is made by AI or not, then in some sense AI has passed as human and what they’ve made is as valuable as the same thing had it been made by a human. It’s a version of the Turing test to detect human-like intelligence in AI. Passing that test does not mean the AI commands the same respect and status as a human, however. Yet this is what the AI gang demand of stuff made with their machines. There’s so much wrong with this it is hard to know where to start. It reduces the idea of value of making something to the product, and often these days that’s something digital - one of the few things in reality that can be exactly the same as another. In the real world, a copy cannot physically be the same as the original. Only information or ideas can be perfectly copied.

We can look to the world of fine art for inspiration on how people regard copies. The great masters trained and worked closely with teams of people, who themselves were great artists, and able to make precise copies of their mentor’s work, and create new pieces in the same style. The provenance of these works is very hard to determine, and yet there is great effort expended to do exactly that. Discovering a work was, or was not, made by a particular artist is huge news, and it is often only decided by some detail in brushwork, framing, paint chemistry, history, or archaeology. Why is it so important? You might think it isn’t. For those who care about such things, knowing where a work comes from is crucial to fully appreciating it. Let’s forget about those crusty old men, and look at a revered modern artist, Tracey Emin. If you approach her scribbly drawings and neon writing signs without knowledge of her past traumas, they look trite and incompetent. If you return to them after watching How It Feels, her film about her experience of having an abortion, you will be choking back tears of sadness and compassion.

If it matters so much which person made something, and why they made it, then surely it is easy to see that anything made by AI is practically worthless, even if its provenance cannot be detected. But maybe a little bit of AI is fine? How does it differ from the technicians, assistants and apprentices employed by many great artists? Crucially, those people are people, too, who relate to and reflect the specific artistry and humanity of the person at the helm. Technicians and craftspeople who work with artists are not unthinking automatons - they proactively and substantially contribute to artworks, drawing on their individual skills and experiences as human beings. Even though there are humans prompting everything AI does, when the balance of creation shifts from humans to machines, the humanity of the finished work drains away.

Emin’s drawings and words were scribbled by hands that once held a dead foetus that fell out of her after a botched abortion. Detaching her art from that event is vandalism. Her life, her experiences, her humanity - they are important.

Let’s talk about nose-picking, again. Why are the contents of my nose not held up as great works of art? Why aren’t they on show at the Science Museum as an example of the splendour my unique humanity? Why don’t they fetch the same prices as gold on international trading markets? Obviously, it’s because they’re not very special. Literally every human, and most mammals, and perhaps some reptiles, produce nasal mucous, which sometimes dries out to form lumps that require removal. My nose makes this stuff without any conscious effort on my part, and digging out dessicated snotballs is not hard, and is often quite pleasurable. The same can be said of the products of AI. When you show me your AI-thing, it feels like you’re showing me one of your own bogies. It’s not impressive, it’s not special, it’s not interesting, it’s not valuable - because I could make the same thing with almost no effort myself. You might like the thing you made, just as you might like the smell of your own farts. That’s no reason to present either to me. Away with you.

There is a kind of person whose bodily functions, and crappy art, are highly valued by some: children. If a child shows me a picture of a dog so bad they have to tell me it is a dog, I will ooh appreciatively and say it’s lovely, because I know they’re learning and will not continue to learn if I give their work the critique it deserves - and their naivity is charming, and gives me nostalgia for a more innocent time of my own life. An adult showing me their no-effort AI shit deserves no such allowance. You’re a grown-up, you’re not learning anything, and you inspire no nostalgia in me. Grow up.

Pastime is such a beautiful word. The idea of an activity that is simply for letting time pass is wonderful in a world where we’re encouraged to fill every moment with meaningful industry. When I was at school, there were all sorts of stupid collection fads, people collecting pig ornaments, or pencils, or whatever. They’d go on TV showing off their collection of 15,000 bottle caps and people would say, oh wow, you have been busy. It’s ultimately a total waste of time (let’s set aside the fact that everything is), but it is appreciated because someone has found it important enough to spend their precious life doing it. A human’s time is being passed. A collection of shrunken crisp packets is not inherently a great thing, but what that collection tells you about a person is. They eat a lot of crisps; they have access to an oven; they can focus enough to shrink the packet without destroying it; some of the packets might evoke funny or touching memories; they are quietly struggling with the futility of all human endeavour; and they like all the different colours. Above all, they chose to do it, and it took time and effort, and that makes it worthwhile, even if the fruits of their labour are worthless.

There are other pastimes which involve rather more skill and patience, things that someone might invest in learning over many years, that as well as being fun for the participant, are also impressive or engaging for others. Playing the piano, learning soliloquies to recite from memory, solving Rubiks Cubes competitively, or collecting stories on the fascinating life cycles of obscure parasites. These things are easily done by a computer (even without AI) - but they interest people when they’re done by other people. We wonder what’s going on in their heads, that they had the time and interest to accumulate these talents, we may be a little jealous, and we appreciate that they can conjure up an interesting anecdote about a brain-altering worm without reaching for their phone, or send us into a reverie playing Satie on a battered old upright in the corner of a pub.

We cannot say the same for the fruits of AI. Even a fascinating and beautiful work of art, or a fantastically useful piece of software, is a lifeless product of a lifeless technology when made with AI. Given that one day the works of even the mightiest of us will be reduced to colossal wrecks surrounded by lone and level sands, we must surely value the follies of living, breathing, contemporary humans above all else.

Once you have learned to do something, invested your precious time, energy, and often a lot of money, in learning a craft, why would you stop doing it in favour of using a technology that does it instead, often to a lower standard, but more quickly and cheaply? One reason is that you give in to progress. It’s a reasonable response given the way successive technologies have steamrollered human crafts over millenia, and in particular in the last few centuries and decades. Let me suygest a few other possible responses.

You don’t have to give in by switching to use the technology yourself. This is a stupid reaction, the reaction of someone with no self-respect. You are no longer using the skills you have learned, but rather managing a technology - the same way someone with a fraction of your talent could. Eventually, as it becomes obvious that almost anyone can do this, your wages will drop. So, as well as abandoning a craft you’ve invested in, you’re earning less. Don’t help this process: get out early, and find another way to use your talents properly, or learn new ones that don’t simply happen to align with the desires of the company who have disrespected and devalued your craft. A company that doesn’t value your brain doesn’t deserve your brain.

Although it is true that technologies have reduced human crafts to a side-show, those crafts still exist, and are beloved. People still value things made with love and care by other people. I have owned maybe fifty wooden spoons, but one that has lasted longest - well over ten years - was whittled by a man in a leather apron at a music festival in 2012. I have no stories about my other spoons. You can make perfect music in a bedroom on your own, but people are still (and increasingly) meeting in unventilated little rooms to make terrible music with people whose smell they can taste. Even without AI, it has become extremely easy to write quite powerful software - but I very frequently return to the basic 8-bit games I played in the 80s, often made by one person with an obsession and a lot of instant coffee. I can buy cheap herbs and fruit in my local supermarket, but I very much prefer to grow and pick my own. It is not so much nostalgia as a yearning for simplicity and directness and connection - things that AI cannot offer.

Do not give up your craft because the joyless pricks of big tech tell you to. They do not understand what it is to have pride in a job well done, because they’re talentless hucksters, always looking for shortcuts. One man, the head of a company making AI for making music, literally said that nobody enjoys making music.

You may not think of your job as a craft, but if it is something that you have learned over many years, have to do with care and attention, and you care about the quality of the end result (whatever quality means to you), then you have something that’s worth holding onto, taking pride in, and preserving.

If you enjoy doing something, do it! When you’re using AI, then you’re not doing anything at all.

So, you’ve read this far and realise that you have no talent for your profession, and you don’t enjoy it. Congratulations - AI is perfect for you! But, if you like and respect the people you work with, your friends, your relatives, the people around you in your community - who perhaps do enjoy and take pride in the work they do - perhaps you could think of them before you get addicted to a computerised slave? Your adoption of AI harms others. If you don’t like your job, and you aren’t any good at it, the honest thing to do is quit, and make a position available for someone who deserves it.

AI is designed to be addictive, to make you rely on it, so it is designed to usually give you an answer it thinks you want to hear. We tend to love it when others agree with us, and so that’s what AI tends to do. The result is a fervent microcult with a feedback loop which steadily amplifies our ideas. This is surely not a problem if you’re always right - does that describe you, though? Are you sure? We all desperately need real people to politely disagree with us, to temper our worst instincts and add nuance to our simplifications. Reality is complicated, and to properly reflect that, our own stupid ideas need to occasionally butt up against the stupid ideas of other humans.

I have lost track of how many billions of people there are on the planet, but there are certainly orders of magnitude more natural intelligences than artificial ones. Every one of those people has a different experience of life, a different background of learning about the world, which means their brains are wired up differently. We can learn new things from all of them. But, for the most part, we are using only a handful of AI systems. Imagine if we had collectively chosen five people to go to for all our answers: even if they were the wisest amongst us, it would surely ring alarm bells for all concerned, given humanity’s experience of relying heavily on individuals with big ideas and a lot of power.

If we’re drawing on the same resources for help, information, and creation, we will slowly begin to act the same, make the same things, and ultimately, be the same. I have recently noticed that posters for neighbourhood events all suddenly look the same: a heading in an arc at the top, an overwhelming number of little decorative touches, small bullet points of text scattered about, muted beige-adjacent tones, strings of bunting or fairy lights, a friendly handwritten font (but never Comic Sans!), and the whole thing on a parchment-like background framed in a vignette. Likewise takeaway restaurant menus, which have strangely detailed, glistening food piled impossibly high in stupendous quantities. If we all start to think the same way, act the same way, our beautiful diversity will be smothered by a crushing and tedious uniformity. If everybody looked the same, we’d get tired of looking at each other.

So let’s imagine that we can solve the diversity problem above, perhaps we have personal AI agents that we train ourselves, or maybe we can already ask the AI we use to take our beliefs and values into account. Or, also as mentioned elsewhere, AI has given us the answer it thinks it wants us to hear - or the answer it is allowed to give us by its creators.

The problem is, there are some topics upon which we’d rather not be diverse. Maths, for example: would you want to use an AI that has interesting new theories about the value of two times two? Probably not. Would you be happy with an AI that pleads ignorance on the topic of what happened Tiananmen Square in 1989? Or perhaps presented, unprompted, contrasting views on whether or not the Holocaust happened?

In the matter of facts that come from reality or by definition, or broad theories about the unobservable past or future that are widely accepted, or laws that work perfectly well in certain domains but not in others, we would likely prefer an AI to give us the right answer. Many years ago, on hike in the Amazon jungle, our guide told us he’d cut his hand with a machete, and was using the traditional jungle remedy to heal it: he’d coated it with snake fat, and wrapped it with some rags. He showed us the injury, and it was an appalling sight. I hope, at some point, he found a proper medic to treat it with antiseptics and sterile bandages. There is sometimes an evidence-based best answer to a question. People can, of course, choose who they go to for answers, and sometimes you might go to the alternative medic who prescribes useless herbs for a condition that requires hard drugs, or ask the racist conspiracy theorist about European history. But we are very used to being misled by people, and so bringing some scepticism to their statements, and using other cues to judge their overall intent. Will you do that with AI? Or will you accept that the answer it gives you with confidence and authority is the only correct answer?

US culture has already crept across the world through films and television for years, but the Web has accelerated the creep to a scurry. Perhaps even a scramble. British teenagers use the same slang, idioms, intonation and discourse as American teenagers. They often don’t know that ATM is a new word to English English vocabulary. Social and cultural norms of young Brits reflect those of the US, which they get from social media and the Web more generally. This is not just a function of age: as an adult who left the UK fourteen years ago, I’m shocked by how much the country has moved culturally towards the USA, apparently without the natives noticing. I’m the smart arse next to the cooking pot telling the frog that it is getting warm, and also it’s a cash machine for fuck’s sake.

AI is surely only going to speed up this process. Not only is AI trained on an internet which is dominated by US culture, the most popular AIs are made by US companies. AI’s power to shape the way we think and feel will create a US-centric monoculture, further spreading broken values across the world, stamping out the beautiful and valuable cultures it replaces, and paving the way for yet deeper hegemony.

When you show AI some of your work and ask it to fill in some gaps or give it a little extra something, when you share your mental health or personal struggles with AI and ask for advice, when you tell it you’ve lied on your tax return and ask how best to avoid detection - it’s listening, learning and remembering. Don’t be fooled by big tech’s promises of privacy, they’ve broken and bent the same promises constantly since the advent of the internet, and there’s no reason to trust them now. Your secrets and your creations, once given to AI, become embedded in the data archives of a giant amoral company, and they will do whatever they want with it, and so will whoever they sell it to. Besides, these companies frequently claim no responsibility for the activities of their machines, trying to give the impression the acts of AI are like acts of god. Even they don’t know what AI will do with your data, and they don’t care.

Naturally, this has been a problem for a long time with big tech. They have been tracking and remembering your behaviour for years, initially just to sell you more shit, and then later to adapt their systems to become addictive in a very specific way, tailored to your particular weaknesses. The information you give AI will be used in the same way. Because AI behaviour is somehat out of control, it is inevitable that the data you give it will leak. We’ve all had that weird experience where you get an advert on one platform that seems to target the topic of a private discussion you had elsewhere. If you use AI, prepare yourself to see your work and your secrets being copied and misused by others.

One day, you will die. It is hard to think about a time when you will no longer think, and it is upsetting to imagine what the approach to and moment of death might be like for you. But, looking at the deaths of others, there seems to be a pretty good chance it will be painful and sad. It is such a source of fear that we build elaborately distracted lives and perform breathtaking mental gymnastics to avoid facing this unavoidable destiny: from hobbies, bucket lists, meditation, and mindfulness exercises, through to chasing goals, having children, building legacies, and establishing mythologies embedded in religions with billions of adherents. We’re either trying to avoid thinking about the end of our lives; creating things that will mean our deaths might not matter very much; or imagining we might not actually die. The most blissful moments we can find are those where we are not thinking about the future, or the past, at all, but focused on the nature of what’s present in front of us - rather like the experience of being a dog, or a tree. I would imagine.

This knowledge is perhaps unique to humans, at least amongst organisms we’re aware of. And it is certainly not a fear that can be shared by AI. What AI can do is parrot out the fear of death expressed by humans online, but don’t be fooled - it has no such fear, or any other emotions.

Try, for a moment, to focus on your inevitable death. A time after which there is nothing. What does that mean for what you do now? Are the things that AI can do for you really particularly important to do? Are there solutions that involve real people, that might create beautiful memories for your final days, suffering in pain or delirium? Will you think it time well spent, fake-chatting to a computer with absolutely no understanding of your terrifying destiny, or any of the other myriad indignities that characterise human existence?

To be human is to be born full of hope, to suffer, and to become hopeless in death, and yet nevertheless - live! Do not be the fool who imagines AI is alive in the same way we are.

For many tasks, AI is already the genie in the bottle without the annoying three-wish limit. Story books, novels, and indeed real life are awash with tales of the ennui resulting from having everything you ever wanted. Your activities are not merely a means to an end: the activity is part of the point. In fact, it is probably the entire point, because... almost everything you’ve ever done will be forgotten forever the moment you die. What isn’t forgotten at that point will mostly be lost in the coming years. Within three generations, your descendants - if you have any - will struggle even to remember your name.

Anyone who has helped clear out a dead parent’s home will have had some feeling like this. There’s so much stuff, artifacts, stored carefully in boxes, old presents, mysterious bits of plastic that might be important for something, boxes and boxes of paperwork, photographs, some birthday cards that you gave them, which now return to you. There’s a deep sigh of indescribable melancholy, looking at the detritus left behind by a life, which is (for lack of storage space) mostly discarded.

Having done that, it is hard to imagine any activity is important beyond the immediate experience of it. But with AI, you are not getting any experience of doing anything - because you’re not doing anything. Musicians don’t perform music merely to have the satisfaction of finishing it. The experience of doing it is the entire point. Play life the way musicians play music. It isn’t a race to the end - because the end is death.

The author Iain M. Banks wrote a series of books based around an imagined alien community called The Culture, which had developed to the point where all their basic needs were taken care of, leaving them to do whatever they want to, without any limits. This is enabled by a source of near-infinite energy, combined with robots and artificial intelligences that take care of what these creatures once had to do for themselves.

It is fun to imagine what you might do in those circumstances. Banks had people exploring sexuality, war, games, art - as well as coming into conflict with non-Culture civilisations and individuals. What would you do, if you didn’t have to pay rent, or for food, or look after your health, or think? It’s likely that your hobbies already give you some idea, and they might expand to encompass all sorts of new things if you’re ever lucky enough to retire.

I wonder if we’ve been fooled into thinking we can’t do a lot of those things now? To what extent do you do your job to enable a lifestyle that’s only necessary because you have a job? Do you need a high income to pay high rents in a city you only live in for access to a high income job? Do you take expensive holidays that require a handsome income just to rest from the stress of your profession? Did you buy an unnecessarily large house because your income allowed you to take out a mortgage - only to become trapped in your job in order to pay it off?

A life of leisure for all, free from want and responsibility, is extremely distant. It will not happen in your lifetime. But some of the things humanity is striving for when creating ever more elaborate technologies, and the social and financial structures that enable them, are perhaps much closer than we think. We just have to think and live more simply.

Every human since history began can reasonably claim that technology seems to have advanced more in their lifetime than almost all of preceding history. There is no doubt that technological progress is accelerating, and it’s easy to see why - technologies combine, and new technologies are built upon them. It’s a combinatorial explosion, fuelled by an ever expanding population, discoveries of new energy sources, availability of information to all, improving and lengthening education, and faster and more effective communication.

So far, it seems that this progress has generally improved the fate of most of humanity - albeit at the expense of the rest. This isn’t a reason to continue this progress without question, however. We only have to be badly wrong once for this claim to no longer be possible to make, since nobody will exist to make it. It would be incredibly stupid for us to proceed into foreseeable disaster on the basis that, so far, our progress has not resulted in our collective extermination. You could use the same reasoning to justify a march along a path up a volcano into the pool of boiling lava at its peak.

Less dramatically, how can we tell if we’ve started on a downward slope, and so halt progress, or change direction? Do we really look objectively at how humanity is faring? What metrics are we using? Are we ignoring the negative counterparts to the benefits of technology that coexist in individuals, and how do we weigh them against each other? Whose lives are we looking at - are we ignoring some people in order to make things look better than they are? And how do we know if changes are due to technology, or political interventions, or evolving social norms, or something else?

What we can say for sure is that those of us who live in the developed world already have more than enough stuff. We complain about the cost of storing our stuff. We complain that we cannot organise our stuff, or find it overwhelming, or can never find the thing that we want in the pile of stuff, or that we can’t sell our stuff or even give it away, because everyone else also has too much stuff. We struggle dealing with the stuff we no longer want, we bury it, burn it, sometimes recycle it into yet more stuff. We occasionally frantically get rid of stuff to simplify our lives, particularly when we near death and wish to spare our relatives the burden of sifting through all this fucking stuff. Physical or digital stuff, it’s all the same.

AI is not just more stuff: it’s an additional layer of stuff-generation - it makes stuff out of stuff, and more stuff out of that. It’s another dimension in the combinatorial explosion of technology. We already have so much software, music, art, film... we already have doctors, and therapists, and lawyers. If we need any more of this kind of thing, there are plenty of real people willing to step up, who will make that stuff with the experience, pride, care, joy, fear, and pure humanity that AI-made vibe-stuff will always lack. We certainly don’t need a technology that produces things more quickly for people who already suffer with more than they need.

Let’s look more generally at the nature of technology development, in particular for consumers. Traditionally one might hope that technology would be developed according to some unmet human want. It seems to me that for at least twenty years, technology has more often been a solution in search of a problem. AI really seems to be the pinnacle of that trend: nobody asked for it, it just appeared from nowhere and suddenly it is everywhere, we’re being actively encouraged to use it, and some employers even force us to. Isn’t this wrong? I would propose that technology should always be serving us. That is the kind of technology I got into as a child, and learned to create as a teenager, and wanted to provide as an adult. In two decades, the tables have turned, and humanity now seems to dance to the rhythm of technology, bending to its way of working, chained to notifications and addictive experiences, fooled into playing along with gamified apps that harvest our attention and slyly control our behaviour.

The media is full of advice on reducing our use of addictive technology, and AI falls precisely into that category. It has the same qualities as social media, and you should be reducing or eliminating your use of both. You know this to be true: you do not feel better after a scrolling or prompting session. You feel drained, time disappeared, you find reality confusing, yet you find some small joys in it that renew your humanity - ready for the pangs of addiction to kick in again, a short time later.

Do less, have less, and cherish your limited and frail humanity more. It is real and honest, unlike the illusion of power and connection given by technology.