I’m writing this in early 2026, where technology leaders and futurists are touting AI as the future of society. A lot has been made about how this technology can be used to write software, generate text or images, create 3d worlds, and make lots of things possible that weren’t before.
Personally, I find it hard to be excited about “the box that makes stuff up” in such an age of misinformation, fake news, and government leaders blatantly lying about documented events. The training of these models largely involved stealing the time, labor, and education from all creators of information and culture. The technology appears to be rapidly increasing our resource demand while causing billions of dollars to float around between companies that aren’t making profits.
Undoubtedly, AI tools can allow people to do things they never were able to do in the past. Have an idea for a video game, but don’t know anything about software development, game design, story writing, animation, music composition, sound effects, marketing, or other related skills? AI can help you create those just on vibes. That’s art being created that wouldn’t have been before – albeit at the cost of either learning those skills or paying professionals in those areas. Which, to be fair, we have seen technological changes that made things easier. Cars and semis replacing horse drawn wagons meant we could travel and transport goods farther. 3D printers, CNC machines, and even power tools allow things to be built quicker and more precise than before. Certainly, computers and the internet have made many changes to how work and art are created and shared in today’s society.
But there also seems to be a notion that AI will be everywhere and solve every problem. It will be able to do all jobs, and do them well. We’ll have robots doing household chores. Driverless cars will take us where we need to go. Delivery drones will bring us stuff that we buy. And I’m sure for certain people that does fit your needs, but I don’t think it’ll help me much.
- If AI takes my job, that certainly doesn’t help me any. I can’t see it being good enough to do cancer treatments, so we’re pretty safe on that front. But as someone whose job could be boiled down to “writes text for people”, I’m a bit nervous of my future. I can’t see our current political climate offering up any kind of Universal Basic Income, and certainly not at the urgency that would be needed if millions are quickly left out of work. I also don’t see the capitalist machine we’re in suddenly being generous to anyone but their shareholders.
- AI won’t help me balance working, being present for my wife and daughter, getting groceries, cleaning house, making meals, seeing family and friends, exploring our new neighborhood, building connections with my community, enjoying hobbies, and all the other demands on my time. I guess if I don’t have a job then there’s naturally more time for those things, but that’s undesirable in many other ways. I also don’t see how the “robot that does your laundry” would ever be any kind of mass-market affordable.
- AI won’t help me be a good dad. It’s been a journey helping my daughter work on patience, listening, and generally managing her emotions. I’m sure ChatGPT has ingested all child psychology research and will be happy to give me tips (at the detriment of future research in the field). But there’s a lot of staying calm and meeting her with love and care that takes a lot of energy. I likely should seek out therapy to help give me more tools on this, which I’m guessing is another industry AI is hoping to cannibalize for profit.
- The drain in one of our bathtubs is clogged. The discharge pipe from our sump pump is frozen. Those are annoying and varying degrees of problems to fix. It’s maybe obvious that AI can’t solve these, but they stand stark in the face of “AI will do all jobs”.
- AI won’t bring justice to the murder of Renée Good or Alex Pretti, or the racist and xenophobic policies that led to their murder. If anything, the Trump administration has seemingly been leaning on AI-generated media in their public communications to spread their agenda.
- AI won’t bridge the technological divide in this country. I can see it being a democratizing force bringing tools to the masses, but we’re already seeing that the best and most powerful models are behind paywalls (and a shift from acquisition to profit will likely make this cost go up further). Rural IL families barely have internet to hold down a Netflix stream let alone be able to benefit from a humanless world of self-driving Ubers and DoorDash delivery drones.
Seemingly, the end goal is for AI to enhance all aspects of life. But the vast majority of press I see is “look at all these jobs AI can do now”. Which at best maybe that means a team of 10 can now act like a team of 100, or 1000. But what becomes of those 90 or 990 workers that could have had a job and now don’t?
I worry that this post can be read as “the struggles in my life are more real than yours”, but I don’t necessarily intend that. If AI makes a lot of your life easier and lets you do things you couldn’t do before, or gives you more time to devote to other things, that’s great! I just worry that those with lots of problems that AI can solve are assuming everyone will also have their lives similarly improved by this technology.
Line Goes Up is a wonderful documentary by Dan Olson from the Folding Ideas YouTube channel that discusses the NFT and Cryptocurrency craze. In discussing the advocates of crypto, Dan states: “because they understand one very complicated thing, programming with cryptography, then all other complicated things must be lesser in complexity, and naturally lower in the hierarchy of reality. Nails – easily driven by the hammer that they have created.” I can’t help but think of this quote when I hear of all the wonders and benefits AI will bring.