I actually think AI is fun and good. It’s just that if we don’t solve the problems it’s not worth it (if the problems will destroy us all).
It’s like cars. I oppose cars but I actually love riding in the shotgun seat on the open road bopping to that hecking song that goes “and all that I can see is just another lemon tree”. Yeah, yeah, I get motion sick on small bumpy country roads but being in transit, being on the way between places, feels good somehow. And that joy of course pales in comparison to all the good cars do, what they enable, all the problems that cars solved.
It’s just… We only have one planet and so many ways to mess it up.
Humans, like other eusocial species, have a tendency to create systems and structures larger than themselves. We create these runaway processes like whoops we invented the stock market (or it emerged, rather) and now corporations sort of kinda metaphorically are alive and are trying to kill us. So not only are direct fossil extraction and burnination bad, other runaway systems are also risky AF because look at where we are with these billionaires and corrupt policy processes. Yeah, yeah, maybe the solution will also come in the form of a runaway process but let’s make sure we fix the problems before we wreck ourselves here.
People (including me) make fun of young Earth creationism (that has got to be an exonym, right? Because whaddayamean “young” when in their world view the Earth is literally the oldest thing that exists) but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how even though the actual Earth is super old and it’s in a universe that’s even older, and hominids like us have existed for many hundred thousands of years, the world of writing is actually pretty young. Only a few thousand years.
We’ve managed to destroy the planet in an embarrassingly short time. That to me really goes to show that we’re doing something fundamentally wrong and that wrong thing is called fossil fuels so leave it in the ground. And our entire protcol for resource and task distribution thrives on exploitation loops widening wealth gaps and destroying the environment in many ways.